The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

  I produced the envelope at once, and opened it. It contained but a single sheet of paper, bearing these cryptic and ominous lines:

  “I have mined the house and all. Go immediately without delay, to the pasture gate west of the house, where in the shrubbery on the right side of the lane as you approach from Arkham, I have concealed the detonator. My Uncle Amos was right—it should have been done in the first place. If you fail me, Haddon, then before God you loose upon the courtryside such a scourge as man has never known and will never see again— if indeed he survives it!”

  Some inkling of the cataclysmic truth must at that moment have begun to penetrate my mind, for when Judge Wilton leaned back, looked at me quizzically, and asked, “What are you going to do?” I replied without hesitation: “I’m going to follow those instructions to the letter!”

  He gazed at me for a moment without comment; then he bowed to the inevitable and settled back. “We shall wait for ten o’clock together,” he said gravely.

  The final act of the incredible horror that had its focal point in the Tuttle house took place just a little before ten, coming upon us in the beginning in so disarmingly prosaic a manner that the full horror, when it came, was doubly shocking and profound. For at five minutes to ten, the telephone rang. Judge Wilton took it at once, and even from where I sat I could hear the agonized voice of Paul Tuttle calling my name.

  I took the telephone from Judge Wilton.

  “This is Haddon,” I said with a calmness I did not feel. “What is it, Paul?”

  “Do it now!” he cried. “Oh, God, Haddon—right away—before … too late. Oh, God—the haven! The haven! … You know the place … pasture gate. O, God, be quick!…” And then there happened what I shall never forget: the sudden, terrible degeneration of his voice, so that it was as if it crumpled together and sank into abysmal mouthings; for the sounds that came over the wire were bestial and crude, brutish, drooling sounds, from among which certain of them recurred again and again, and I listened in steadily mounting horror to the triumphant gibbering before it died away:

  “Iä! Iä! Hastur! Ugh! Ugh! Iä Hastur cf’ ayak ’vulgtmm, vugtlagln vulgtmm! Ai! Shub-Niggurath! … Hastur—Hastur cf’tagn! Iä! Iä! Hastur!…”

  Then abruptly all sound died away, and I turned to face Judge Wilton’s terror-stricken features. And yet I did not see him, nor did I see anything in my understanding of what must be done; for abruptly, with cataclysmic effect, I understood what Tuttle had failed to know until too late. And at once I dropped the telephone; at once I ran hatless and coatless from the house into the street, with the sound of Judge Wilton frantically summoning police over the telephone fading into the night behind me. I ran with unnatural speed from the shadowed, haunted streets of witch-cursed Arkham into the October night, down the Aylesbury Road, into the lane and the pasture gate, where for one brief instant, while sirens blew behind me, I saw the Tuttle house through the orchard outlined in a hellish purple glow, beautiful but unearthly and tangibly evil.

  Then I pushed down the detonator, and with a tremendous roar, the old house burst asunder and flames leaped up where the house had stood.

  For a few dazed moments I stood there, aware suddenly of the arrival of the police along the road south of the house, before I began to move up to join them, and so saw that the explosion had brought about what Paul Tuttle had hinted: the collapse of the subterranean caverns below the house; for the land itself was settling, slipping down, and the flames that had risen were hissing and steaming in the water gushing up from below.

  Then it was that that other thing happened—the last unearthly horror that mercifully blotted out what I saw in the wreckage jutting out above the rising waters— the great protoplasmic mass risen from the center of the lake forming where the Tuttle house had been, and the thing that came crying out at us across the lawn before it turned to face that other and begin a titanic struggle for mastery interrupted only by the brilliant explosion of light that seemed to emanate from the eastern sky like a bolt of incredibly powerful lightning; a tremendous discharge of energy in the shape of light, so that for one awful moment everything was revealed—before lightning-like appendages descended as from the heart of the blinding pillar of light itself, one seizing the mass in the waters, lifting it high, and casting it far out to sea, the other taking that second thing from the lawn and hurling it, a dark dwindling blot, into the sky, where it vanished among the eternal stars! And then came sudden, absolute, cosmic silence, and where, a moment before, this miracle of light had been, there was now only darkness and the line of trees against the sky, and low in the east the gleaming eye of Betelgeuse as Orion rose into the autumn night.

  For an instant I did not know which was worse—the chaos of the previous moment, or the utter black silence of the present; but the small cries of horrified men brought it back to me, and it was borne in upon me then that they at least did not understand the secret horror, the final thing that sears and maddens, the thing that rises in the dark hours to stalk the bottomless depths of the mind. They may have heard, as I did, that thin, far whistling sound, that maddening ululation from the deep, immeasurable gulf of cosmic space, the wailing that fell back along the wind, and the syllables that floated down the slopes of air: Tekeli-li, tekeli-li, tekeli-li … And certainly they saw the thing that came crying out at us from the sinking ruins behind, the distorted caricature of a human being, with its eyes sunk to invisibility in thick masses of scaly flesh, the thing that flailed its arms bonelessly at us like the appendages of an octopus, the thing that shrieked and gibbered in Paul Tuttle’s voice!

  But they could not know the secret that I alone knew, the secret Amos Tuttle might have guessed in the shadows of his dying hours, the thing Paul Tuttle was too late in learning: that the haven sought by Hastur the Unspeakable, the haven promised Him Who is not to be Named, was not the tunnel, and not the house, but the body and soul of Amos Tuttle himself, and failing these, the living flesh and immortal soul of him who lived in that doomed house on the Aylesbury Road!

  The Whippoorwills in the Hills

  I TOOK POSSESSION of my cousin Abel Harrop’s house on the last day of April, 1928, because it was plain by that time that the men from the sheriff’s office at Aylesbury were either unable or unwilling to make any progress in explaining his disappearance, and I was determined therefore to carry on my own investigation. This was a matter of principle, rather than of affection, for my cousin Abel had always been somewhat apart from the rest of the family; he had had a reputation since his adolescence for being queer and had never made any effort to visit the rest of us or to invite our own visits. Nor was his plain house in a remote valley seven miles off the Aylesbury Pike out of Arkham particularly a place to excite interest in most of us, who lived in Boston and Portland. I especially want this to be clear, since subsequent events make it imperative that no other motive be ascribed to my coming to stay in the house.

  My cousin Abel’s home was, as I have said, very plain. It was built in the conventional fashion of New England houses, many of which can be seen in scores of villages throughout and even farther south; it was a kind of rectangular house, of two storeys, with a stoop out back and front porch set in one corner in order to complete the rectangle. This porch had at one time been efficiently screened, but there were now small tears in the screen, and it presented a general air of decay. However, the house itself, which was of wood, was neat enough; its siding had been painted white less than a year ago before my cousin’s disappearance, and this coat of paint had worn well enough so that the house seemed quite new, as apart from the screened porch. There was a woodshed off to the right, and a smoke-house near that. There was also an open well, with a roof over it, and a windlass with buckets on it. On the left there was another, more serviceable pump, and two smaller sheds. As my cousin did not farm, there was no place for animals.

  The interior of the house was in good condition. Clearly, my cousin had always kept it well, though the furnishings were s
omewhat worn and faded, having been inherited from his parents, who had died two decades before. The lower floor consisted of a small, confining kitchen which opened to the stoop out back, an old-fashioned parlor, somewhat larger than most, and a room which had evidently once been a dining-room, but which had been converted into a study by my cousin Abel, and was filled with books—on crude, home-made shelves, on boxes, on chairs, a secretary and the table. There were even piles of them on the floor, and one book lay open on the table, just as it had lain when my cousin disappeared; they had told me at the courthouse in Aylesbury that nothing had been disturbed. The second storey was a gable storey; its rooms all had sloping roofs, though there were three of them, all small, two of which were bedrooms, and the third a storeroom. Each room had one gable-window, no more. One of the bedrooms was over the kitchen, one over the parlor, and the storeroom was over the study. There was no reason to believe that my cousin Abel had occupied either of the bedrooms, however; indications were that he made use of a couch in the parlor, and, since the couch was softer than usual, I determined to use it also. The stairway to the second floor led up out of the kitchen, thereby contributing to the lack of room.

  The events of my cousin’s disappearance were very simple, as any reader who may remember the spare newspaper accounts can testify. He had last been seen in Aylesbury early in April; he had bought five pounds of coffee, ten pounds of sugar, some wire, and a large amount of netting. Four days afterward, on the seventh of April, a neighbor, passing by and failing to observe smoke coming from the chimney, went in, after some reluctance; my cousin had apparently not been very well liked; having a surly nature, and his neighbors had kept away from him, but, since the seventh was a cold day, Lem Giles had gone up to the door and rapped. When there was no answer, he pushed on the door; it was open and he went in. He found the house deserted and cold, and a lamp which had been used beside a book still open on the table had plainly burned itself out. While Giles thought this a curious state of affairs, he did not report it until three days after that, on the tenth, when he again passed by the house on his way to Aylesbury, and, stopping for a similar reason, found nothing altered in any way in the house. At that time he spoke to a storekeeper in Aylesbury about it and was advised to report the matter at the sheriff’s office. With great reluctance, he did so. A deputy-sheriff drove out to my cousin’s place and looked around. Since there had been a thaw, there was nothing to show footprints, the snow having been quickly melted away. And since a little of the coffee and sugar my cousin had bought had been used, it was assumed that he had vanished within a day or so of his visit to Aylesbury. There was some evidence—as there still was in the loose pile of netting in a rocking-chair in one corner of the parlor—that my cousin was planning to do something with the netting he had bought; but, since it was of the type used in seines along the coast at Kingsport for the purpose of catching rough fish, his intention was obscured in some mystery.

  The efforts of the sheriff’s men from Aylesbury were, as I have hinted, only perfunctory. There was nothing to show that they were eager to investigate Abel’s disappearance; perhaps they were too readily discouraged by the reticence of his neighbors. I did not mean to be. If the reports of the sheriff’s men were reliable—and I had no reason to believe they were not—then his neighbors had steadfastly avoided Abel and even now, after his disappearance, when he was presumed dead, they were no more willing to speak of him than they had been to associate with him before. Indeed, I had tangible evidence of the neighbor’s feeling before I had been in my cousin’s house a day.

  Though the house was not wired for electric lights, it was on a telephone line. When the telephone rang in mid-afternoon—less than two hours after my arrival at the house—I went over and took the receiver off the hook, forgetting that my cousin was on a party line. I had been dilatory to answer, and when I removed the receiver, someone was already talking. Even then, I would have replaced the receiver without more ado, had it not been for mention of my cousin’s name. Being possessed of a natural share of curiosity, I stood still, listening.

  “… somebody’s come to Abe Harrop’s house,” came a woman’s voice. “Lem come by there from town ten minutes ago and seen it.”

  Ten minutes, I thought. That would be Lem Giles’ place, the nearest neighbor up the Pocket and over the hill.

  “Oh, Mis’ Giles, ye don’t s’pose he’s come back?”

  “Hope the Lord he don’t! but ’taint him. Leastwise, Lem said it didn’t look like him nohow.”

  “If he comes back, I want to git aout o’ here. There’s been enough goin’s-on for a decent body.”

  “They ain’t found hide nor hair of him.”

  “An’ they wun’t, neither. They got him. I knowed he acallin’ ’em. Amos told him right off to git rid o’them books, but he knowed better. Asettin’ there night after night, readin’ in them devilish books.”

  “Don’t you worry none, Hester.”

  “All these goin’s-on, it’s a God’s mercy a body’s alive to worry!”

  This somewhat ambiguous conversation convinced me that the natives of this secluded Pocket of hill country knew far more than they had told the men from the sheriff’s office. But this initial conversation was only the beginning. Thereafter the telephone rang at half-hour intervals, and my arrival at my cousin’s house was the principal topic of conversation. Thereafter, too, I listened shamelessly.

  The neighbors circling the Pocket where the house stood numbered seven families, none of which was in sight of any part of my cousin’s house. There were, in this order: up the pocket, Lem and Abby Giles, and their two sons, Arthur and Robert, with one daughter, Virginia, a feeble-minded girl in her late twenties; beyond them, well up into the next Pocket, Lute and Jethro Corey, bachelors, with a hired man, Curtis Begbie; east of them, deep in the hills, Seth Whateley, his wife, Emma, and their three children, Willie, Mamie, and Ella; down from them, and opposite my cousin’s house about a mile to the east, Laban Hough, a widower, his children, Susie and Peter, and his sister, Lavinia; about a half mile further down, along the road that led into the Pocket, Clem Osborn and his wife, Marie, with two hired men, John and Andrew Baxter; and finally, over the hills west of my cousin’s house, Rufus and Angeline Wheeler, with their sons, Perry and Nathaniel and the three spinster Hutchins sisters, Hester, Josephine, and Amelia, with two hired men, Jesse Trumbull and Amos Whateley.

  All these people were connected to the single party line which included my cousin’s telephone. In the course of three hours, what with one woman calling another, back and forth without any end before supper-time, everyone on the line had been informed of my coming, and, as each woman added her bit of information, each of the others learned who I was, and correctly guessed my purpose. All this was perhaps natural enough in such isolated neighborhoods, where the most trivial event is a subject of deep concern to people who have little else to engage their attention; but what was disturbing about this fire of gossip on the party wire was the unmistakable undercurrent of fear which was omnipresent. Clearly, my cousin Abel Harrop had been shunned for some reason connected with this incredible fear of him and whatever it was he was doing. It was sobering to reflect that out of such primitive fear could very easily rise the decision to kill in order to escape that fear.

  I knew it would be no easy task to break down the suspicious reserve of the neighbors, but I was determined that it must and would be done. I retired early that night, but I did not reckon with the difficulties of going to sleep in such an environment as my cousin’s house. Where I had expected an unbroken silence, I found instead a maddening cacophony of sound which assaulted and engulfed the house. Beginning a half hour after sundown, in mid-twilight, there was such a calling of whippoorwills as I have never heard before; where one bird had called alone for five minutes or thereabouts, in thirty minutes there were twenty birds calling, and in an hour the number of whippoorwills seemed to have risen to well over a hundred. Moreover, the configuration of the Pocket
was such that the hills at one side threw back the echoes of sounds from the other, so that the voices of a hundred birds soon assumed the proportions of two, varying in intensity from a demanding scream rising with explosive force from just beyond my window to a faintly whispered call coming from far up or down the valley. Knowing a little of the habits of whippoorwills, I fully expected the calls to cease within an hour of beginning, and to start up again before dawn. In this I was mistaken. Not only did the birds call incessantly all night long, but it was unmistakably evident that a large number of them flew in from the woods to sit on the roof of the house, as well as the sheds and the ground around the house, making such a deafening racket that I was completely unable to sleep until dawn, when, one by one, they drifted away and were silent.

  I knew then that I could not long withstand this nerve-wracking cacophony of song.

  I had not slept an hour before I was awakened, still exhausted, by the ringing of the telephone. I got up and took down the receiver, wondering what was wanted at this hour, and who was calling. I muttered a sleepy, “Hello.”

  “Harrop?”

  “This is Dan Harrop,” I said.

  “Got suthin’ to tell ye. Air ye listenin’?”

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  Listen t’ me, Harrop. If you knows what’s good fer ye, ye’ll git aout o’ there as fast as ye c’n git!”

  Before I could register my astonishment, the line went dead. I was still somewhat drowsy from lack of sleep. I stood for a moment; then hung up the receiver. A man’s voice, gruff and old. Certainly one of the neighbors; the telephone bell had rung as if it had been ground by someone on the line and not by the central.