Yog Sothothery - The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft Anthology

by H. P. Lovecraft

“That—that, James—was—my life. Surama made it so—he taught me, and kept me at it till I couldn’t stop. Then—then it got too much even for him. He tried to check me. Fancy—he trying to check anybody in that line! But now I’ve got my last specimen. That is my last test. Good subject, James—I’m healthy—devilish healthy. Deuced ironic, though—the madness has gone now, so there won’t be any fun watching the agony! Can’t be—can’t—”

  A violent shiver of fever racked the doctor, and Dalton mourned amidst his horror-stupefaction that he could give no grief. How much of Alfred’s story was sheer nonsense, and how much nightmare truth he could not say; but in any case he felt that the man was a victim rather than a criminal, and above all, he was a boyhood comrade and Georgina’s brother. Thoughts of the old days came back kaleidoscopically. ‘Little Alf’—the yard at Phillips Exeter—the quadrangle at Columbia—the fight with Tom Cortland when he saved Alf from a pommeling…

  He helped Clarendon to the lounge and asked gently what he could do. There was nothing. Alfred could only whisper now, but he asked forgiveness for all his offences, and commended his sister to the care of his friend.

  “You—you’ll—make her happy,” he gasped. “She deserves it. Martyr—to—a myth! Make it up to her, James. Don’t—let—her—know—more—than she has to!”

  His voice trailed off in a mumble, and he fell into a stupor. Dalton rang the bell, but Margarita had gone to bed, so he called up the stairs for Georgina. She was firm of step, but very pale. Alfred’s scream had tried her sorely, but she had trusted James. She trusted him still as he shewed her the unconscious form on the lounge and asked her to go back to her room and rest, no matter what sounds she might hear. He did not wish her to witness the awful spectacle of delirium certain to come, but bade her kiss her brother a final farewell as he lay there calm and still, very like the delicate boy he had once been. So she left him—the strange, moonstruck, star-reading genius she had mothered so long—and the picture she carried away was a very merciful one.

  Dalton must bear to his grave a sterner picture. His fears of delirium were not vain, and all through the black midnight hours his giant strength restrained the frenzied contortions of the mad sufferer. What he heard from those swollen, blackening lips he will never repeat. He has never been quite the same man since, and he knows that no one who hears such things can ever be wholly as he was before. So, for the world’s good, he dares not speak, and he thanks God that his layman’s ignorance of certain subjects makes many of the revelations cryptic and meaningless to him.

  Toward morning Clarendon suddenly woke to a sane consciousness and began to speak in a firm voice.

  “James, I didn’t tell you what must be done—about everything. Blot out these entries in Greek and send my notebook to Dr. Miller. All my other notes, too, that you’ll find in the files. He’s the big authority today—his article proves it. Your friend at the club was right.

  “But everything in the clinic must go. Everything without exception, dead or alive or—otherwise. All the plagues of hell are in those bottles on the shelves. Burn them—burn it all—if one thing escapes, Surama will spread black death throughout the world. And above all burn Surama! That—that thing—must not breathe the wholesome air of heaven. You know now—what I told you—you know why such an entity can’t be allowed on earth. It won’t be murder—Surama isn’t human—if you’re as pious as you used to be, James, I shan’t have to urge you. Remember the old text—‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’—or something of the sort.

  “Burn him, James! Don’t let him chuckle again over the torture of mortal flesh! I say, burn him—the Nemesis of Flame—that’s all that can reach him, James, unless you can catch him asleep and drive a stake through his heart… Kill him—extirpate him—cleanse the decent universe of its primal taint—the taint I recalled from its age-long sleep…”

  The doctor had risen on his elbow, and his voice was a piercing shriek toward the last. The effort was too much, however, and he lapsed very suddenly into a deep, tranquil coma. Dalton, himself fearless of fever, since he knew the dread germ to be non-contagious, composed Alfred’s arms and legs on the lounge and threw a light afghan over the fragile form. After all, mightn’t much of this horror be exaggeration and delirium? Mightn’t old Doc MacNeil pull him through on a long chance? The governor strove to keep awake, and walked briskly up and down the room, but his energies had been taxed too deeply for such measures. A second’s rest in the chair by the table took matters out of his hands, and he was presently sleeping soundly despite his best intentions.

  Dalton started up as a fierce light shone in his eyes, and for a moment he thought the dawn had come. But it was not the dawn, and as he rubbed his heavy lids he saw that it was the glare of the burning clinic in the yard, whose stout planks flamed and roared and crackled heavenward in the most stupendous holocaust he had ever seen. It was indeed the ‘Nemesis of Flame’ that Clarendon had wished, and Dalton felt that some strange combustibles must be involved in a blaze so much wilder than anything normal pine or redwood could afford. He glanced alarmedly at the lounge, but Alfred was not there. Starting up, he went to call Georgina, but met her in the hall, roused as he was by the mountain of living fire.

  “The clinic’s burning down!” she cried. “How is Al now?”

  “He’s disappeared—disappeared while I dropped asleep!” replied Dalton, reaching out a steadying arm to the form which faintness had begun to sway.

  Gently leading her upstairs toward her room, he promised to search at once for Alfred, but Georgina slowly shook her head as the flames from outside cast a weird glow through the window on the landing.

  “He must be dead, James—he could never live, sane and knowing what he did. I heard him quarrelling with Surama, and know that awful things were going on. He is my brother, but—it is best as it is.”

  Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

  Suddenly through the open window came the sound of a deep, hideous chuckle, and the flames of the burning clinic took fresh contours till they half resembled some nameless, Cyclopean creatures of nightmare. James and Georgina paused hesitant, and peered out breathlessly through the landing window. Then from the sky came a thunderous peal, as a forked bolt of lightning shot down with terrible directness into the very midst of the blazing ruin. The deep chuckle ceased, and in its place came a frantic, ululant yelp as of a thousand ghouls and werewolves in torment. It died away with long, reverberant echoes, and slowly the flames resumed their normal shape.

  The watchers did not move, but waited till the pillar of fire had shrunk to a smouldering glow. They were glad of a half-rusticity which had kept the firemen from trooping out, and of the wall that excluded the curious. What had happened was not for vulgar eyes—it involved too much of the universe’s inner secrets for that.

  In the pale dawn, James spoke softly to Georgina, who could do no more than put her head on his breast and sob.

  “Sweetheart, I think he has atoned. He must have set the fire, you know, while I was asleep. He told me it ought to be burned—the clinic, and everything in it, Surama, too. It was the only way to save the world from the unknown horrors he had loosed upon it. He knew, and he did what was best.

  “He was a great man, Georgie. Let’s never forget that. We must always be proud of him, for he started out to help mankind, and was titanic even in his sins. I’ll tell you more sometime. What he did, be it good or evil, was what no man ever did before. He was the first and last to break through certain veils, and even Apollonius of Tyana takes second place beside him. But we mustn’t talk about that. We must remember him only as the Little Alf we knew—as the boy who wanted to master medicine and conquer fever.”

  In the afternoon the leisurely firemen overhauled the ruins and found two skeletons with bits of blackened flesh adhering—only two, thanks to the undisturbed lime-pits. One was of a man; the other is still a subject of debate among the biologists of the coast. It was not exactly an ape’s or a saurian’s skele
ton, but it had disturbing suggestions of lines of evolution of which palaeontology has revealed no trace. The charred skull, oddly enough, was very human, and reminded people of Surama; but the rest of the bones were beyond conjecture. Only well-cut clothing could have made such a body look like a man.

  But the human bones were Clarendon’s. No one disputed this, and the world at large still mourns the untimely death of the greatest doctor of his age; the bacteriologist whose universal fever serum would have far eclipsed Dr. Miller’s kindred antitoxin had he lived to bring it to perfection. Much of Miller’s late success, indeed, is credited to the notes bequeathed him by the hapless victim of the flames. Of the old rivalry and hatred almost none survived, and even Dr. Wilfred Jones has been known to boast of his association with the vanished leader.

  James Dalton and his wife Georgina have always preserved a reticence which modesty and family grief might well account for. They published certain notes as a tribute to the great man’s memory, but have never confirmed or contradicted either the popular estimate or the rare hints of marvels that a very few keen thinkers have been known to whisper. It was very subtly and slowly that the facts filtered out. Dalton probably gave Dr. MacNeil an inkling of the truth, and that good soul had not many secrets from his son.

  The Daltons have led, on the whole, a very happy life; for their cloud of terror lies far in the background, and a strong mutual love has kept the world fresh for them. But there are things which disturb them oddly—little things, of which one would scarcely ever think of complaining. They cannot bear persons who are lean or deep-voiced beyond certain limits, and Georgina turns pale at the sound of any guttural chuckling. Senator Dalton has a mixed horror of occultism, travel, hypodermics, and strange alphabets which most find hard to unify, and there are still those who blame him for the vast proportion of the doctor’s library that he destroyed with such painstaking completeness.

  MacNeil, though, seemed to realise. He was a simple man, and he said a prayer as the last of Alfred Clarendon’s strange books crumbled to ashes. Nor would anyone who had peered understandingly within those books wish a word of that prayer unsaid.

  The Man of Stone

  By H. P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald

  Written: Summer 1932

  First Published: Wonder Stories,

  Vol. 4, No. 5 (October 1932), Pages 440-445, 470

  Ben Hayden was always a stubborn chap, and once he had heard about those strange statues in the upper Adirondacks, nothing could keep him from going to see them. I had been his closest acquaintance for years, and our Damon and Pythias friendship made us inseparable at all times. So when Ben firmly decided to go—well, I had to trot along too, like a faithful collie.

  “Jack,” he said, “you know Henry Jackson, who was up in a shack beyond Lake Placid for that beastly spot in his lung? Well, he came back the other day nearly cured, but had a lot to say about some devilish queer conditions up there. He ran into the business all of a sudden and can’t be sure yet that it’s anything more than a case of bizarre sculpture; but just the same his uneasy impression sticks.

  “It seems he was out hunting one day, and came across a cave with what looked like a dog in front of it. Just as he was expecting the dog to bark he looked again, and saw that the thing wasn’t alive at all. It was a stone dog—such a perfect image, down to the smallest whisker, that he couldn’t decide whether it was a supernaturally clever statue or a petrified animal. He was almost afraid to touch it, but when he did he realised it was surely made of stone.

  “After a while he nerved himself up to go into the cave—and there he got a still bigger jolt. Only a little way in there was another stone figure—or what looked like it—but this time it was a man’s. It lay on the floor, on its side, wore clothes, and had a peculiar smile on its face. This time Henry didn’t stop to do any touching but beat it straight for the village, Mountain Top, you know. Of course he asked questions—but they did not get him very far. He found he was on a ticklish subject, for the natives only shook their heads, crossed their fingers, and muttered something about a ‘Mad Dan’—whoever he was.

  “It was too much for Jackson, so he came home weeks ahead of his planned time. He told me all about it because he knows how fond I am of strange things—and oddly enough, I was able to fish up a recollection that dovetailed pretty neatly with his yarn. Do you remember Arthur Wheeler, the sculptor who was such a realist that people began calling him nothing but a solid photographer? I think you knew him slightly. Well, as a matter of fact, he ended up in that part of the Adirondacks himself. Spent a lot of time there, and then dropped out of sight. Never heard from again. Now if stone statues that look like men and dogs are turning up around there, it looks to me as if they might be his work—no matter what the rustics say, or refuse to say, about them. Of course a fellow with Jackson’s nerves might easily get flighty and disturbed over things like that; but I’d have done a lot of examining before running away.

  “In fact, Jack, I’m going up there now to look things over—and you’re coming along with me. It would mean a lot to find Wheeler—or any of his work. Anyhow, the mountain air will brace us both up.”

  So less than a week later, after a long train ride and a jolting bus trip through breathlessly exquisite scenery, we arrived at Mountain Top in the late, golden sunlight of a June evening. The village comprised only a few small houses, a hotel, and the general store at which our bus drew up; but we knew that the latter would probably prove a focus for such information. Surely enough, the usual group of idlers was gathered around the steps; and when we represented ourselves as health-seekers in search of lodgings they had many recommendations to offer.

  Though we had not planned to do any investigating till the next day, Ben could not resist venturing some vague, cautious questions when he noticed the senile garrulousness of one of the ill-clad loafers. He felt, from Jackson’s previous experience, that it would be useless to begin with references to the queer statues; but decided to mention Wheeler as one whom we had known, and in whose fate we consequently had a right to be interested.

  The crowd seemed uneasy when Sam stopped his whittling and started talking, but they had slight occasion for alarm. Even this barefoot old mountain decadent tightened up when he heard Wheeler’s name, and only with difficulty could Ben get anything coherent out of him.

  “Wheeler?” he had finally wheezed. “Oh, yeh—that feller as was all the time blastin’ rocks and cuttin’ ’em up into statues. So yew knowed him, hey? Wal, they ain’t much we kin tell ye, and mebbe that’s too much. He stayed out to Mad Dan’s cabin in the hills—but not so very long. Got so he wa’nt wanted no more… by Dan, that is. Kinder soft-spoken and got around Dan’s wife till the old devil took notice. Pretty sweet on her, I guess. But he took the trail sudden, and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since. Dan must a told him sumthin’ pretty plain—bad feller to get agin ye, Dan is! Better keep away from thar, boys, for they ain’t no good in that part of the hills. Dan’s ben workin’ up a worse and worse mood, and ain’t seen about no more. Nor his wife, neither. Guess he’s penned her up so’s nobody else kin make eyes at her!”

  As Sam resumed his whittling after a few more observations, Ben and I exchanged glances. Here, surely, was a new lead which deserved intensive following up. Deciding to lodge at the hotel, we settled ourselves as quickly as possible; planning for a plunge into the wild hilly country on the next day.

  At sunrise we made our start, each bearing a knapsack laden with provisions and such tools as we thought we might need. The day before us had an almost stimulating air of invitation—through which only a faint undercurrent of the sinister ran. Our rough mountain road quickly became steep and winding, so that before long our feet ached considerably.

  After about two miles we left the road—crossing a stone wall on our right near a great elm and striking off diagonally toward a steeper slope according to the chart and directions which Jackson had prepared for us. It was rough and briery travelling, but w
e knew that the cave could not be far off. In the end we came upon the aperture quite suddenly—a black, bush-grown crevice where the ground shot abruptly upward, and beside it, near a shallow rock pool, a small, still figure stood rigid—as if rivalling its own uncanny petrification.

  It was a grey dog—or a dog’s statue—and as our simultaneous gasp died away we scarcely knew what to think. Jackson had exaggerated nothing, and we could not believe that any sculptor’s hand had succeeded in producing such perfection. Every hair of the animal’s magnificent coat seemed distinct, and those on the back were bristled up as if some unknown thing had taken him unaware. Ben, at last half-kindly touching the delicate stony fur, gave vent to an exclamation.

  “Good God, Jack, but this can’t be any statue! Look at it—all the little details, and the way the hair lies! None of Wheeler’s technique here! This is a real dog—though heaven only knows how he ever got in this state. Just like stone—feel for yourself. Do you suppose there’s any strange gas that sometimes comes out of the cave and does this to animal life? We ought to have looked more into the local legends. And if this is a real dog—or was a real dog—then that man inside must be the real thing too.”

  It was with a good deal of genuine solemnity—almost dread—that we finally crawled on hands and knees through the cave-mouth, Ben leading. The narrowness looked hardly three feet, after which the grotto expanded in every direction to form a damp, twilight chamber floored with rubble and detritus. For a time we could make out very little, but as we rose to our feet and strained our eyes we began slowly to descry a recumbent figure amidst the greater darkness ahead. Ben fumbled with his flashlight, but hesitated for a moment before turning it on the prostrate figure. We had little doubt that the stony thing was what had once been a man, and something in the thought unnerved us both.

  When Ben at last sent forth the electric beam we saw that the object lay on its side, back toward us. It was clearly of the same material as the dog outside, but was dressed in the mouldering and unpetrified remains of rough sport clothing. Braced as we were for a shock, we approached quite calmly to examine the thing; Ben going around to the other side to glimpse the averted face. Neither could possibly have been prepared for what Ben saw when he flashed the light on those stony features. His cry was wholly excusable, and I could not help echoing it as I leaped to his side and shared the sight. Yet it was nothing hideous or intrinsically terrifying. It was merely a matter of recognition, for beyond the least shadow of a doubt this chilly rock figure with its half-frightened, half-bitter expression had at one time been our old acquaintance, Arthur Wheeler.