The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

  Because I acted without delay, and because a bucket of water already stood under the pump, I was able to put the fire out without the burning of more than a square foot or two of siding and some further charring. But it was clear that the fire had been set, and undoubtedly by Amos Whateley, and, had it not been for the whippoorwills’ strange silence, I might have perished in the holocaust. As it was, I was badly shaken, for if my neighbors bore me such ill-feeling as to take such measures to drive me from my cousin’s house, what might I still expect of them? Yet, opposition has always strengthened me; and after a few moments, it was again true. I felt convinced anew that if it was my search for the facts behind my cousin’s disappearance which alarmed them to such a degree as this, then I was on the right track in believing that they knew far more about it than any of them was willing to tell. So I went back to bed determined to face Amos Whateley next day, when I could find him somewhere in the fields, away from the Hutchins house, and we could talk without being overheard.

  Accordingly, in mid-morning I sought out Amos Whateley. He was at work in the same hilltop field where he had worked when first I saw him, but this time he did not come to confront me; instead, he stopped the horses and stood watching me. I saw, as I came up toward the stone fence there that his bearded face held both apprehension and defiance. He stood unmoving, save that he pushed his crumpled felt hat farther back on his head; his lips were pressed together in a firm, unyielding line, but his eyes were wary. Since he was not far from the fence, I stopped where I was, along the woods’ edge.

  “Whateley, I saw you set fire to my house last night,” I said. “Why?”

  There was no answer.

  “Come, come—I came up here to talk to you. I could just as easily go into Aylesbury and talk to the sheriff.”

  “Ye read the books,” he spat forth hoarsely. “I tol’ ye not tew. Ye read thet place aout laoud; I know ye did. Ye opened the Gate, an’ Them from Aoutside kin come. Wa’n’t like yer cousin—he called ’em an’ They come—but he didn’t do whut They wanted; so They took him. But he didn’t know, ye didn’t larn how tew, an’ They’re asettin’ right this minute in this valley an’ nobody knows whut’ll happen next.”

  It took me a few minutes to make sense out of this rigmarole, and even then it was only a sort of sense, not logical, by any means. Amos apparently meant to suggest that by reading aloud a passage from the book my cousin had been reading, I had invited some force or being from “outside” into the valley—doubtless an integral part of the natives’ absurd superstitions.

  “I haven’t seen any strangers about,” I said curtly.

  “Ye dun’t allus see ’em. Cousin Wilbur says They kin take any shape They like an’ They kin git inside ye an’ They kin eat through yer mouth an’ see through yer eyes, an’ if ye hain’t got the pertection, They kin take ye the way They took yer cousin. Ye dun’t see ’em, “ he went on, his voice rising not to almost a scream, “because they’re inside ye this minute.”

  I waited for his hysteria to diminish a little. “And what do They eat?” I asked quietly.

  “Ye know!” he cried vehemently. “Blood an’ sperit—blood to make ’em grow, speret to make ’em wise to human-kind. Laugh, if ye wants tew, but ye ought tew know. They ‘hippoor’lls knows, all right—thet’s why they’re allus a-singin’ an’ acallin’ daown by yer place.”

  I could not help smiling, though his earnestness was not to be questioned and forestalled the laughter he had thought was coming.

  “But that doesn’t explain why you should try to burn my house down—and me, too, for all I know.”

  “I didn’t mean ye no harm, but I wanted for ye to git. If ye hain’t got no house, ye can’t stay.”

  “And do you represent the opinion of all the others?”

  “I know the most,” he said with a faint pride showing through his defiant apprehension. “My Grandpaw hed the books, an’ he tol’ me lots, an’ Cousin Wilbur, he knowed, too, an’ I know thar’s lots o’ things the rest dun’t know abaout whut goes on aout thar—“ he waved one arm towards the heavens—“or daown thar” —he ponted underfoot—“an’ lots they needn’t to know, less’n it’d scare ’em. An’ only half-knowin’ it’s wuss’n nuthin’ a-tall. Ye should-a burnt them books, Mr. Harrop—I tol’ ye. It’s too late naow.”

  I searched his face in vain for any sign to show that he was not serious; he was wholly sincere, even a little regretful, as if he were sorry he had to consign me to whatever nameless fate he foresaw. For a moment I was uncertain as to how to deal with him. One cannot simply overlook an attempt to burn one’s house down, and, for all I knew, one’s self with it.

  “Very well, Amos. Whatever it is you know is your affair. But I know you set fire to my house, and I can’t overlook that. I’ll expect you to make that right. When you have the time, you can come down and repair it; if you do that, I’ll not report you to the sheriff.”

  “Nuthin’ else either?”

  “What else?”

  “If ye dun’t know… .” He shrugged. “I’ll come soon’s I’m able.”

  However ridiculous his rigmarole had been, what he said did disconcert me, largely because there was a wild kind of logic to it. But then, I reflected, as I walked back through the woods to my cousin’s house, there is a perverted kind of logic to all superstition, which explains the tenacity of superstitions from one generation to another. Yet there had also been unmistakable fear in Amos Whateley, a fear unaccountable except by superstition, for Whateley was a powerful man who could in all probability have tossed me over the stone fence that separated us, with a heave of one arm. And in Whateley’s attitude lay the undeniable germ of something profoundly disturbing, if only I could have access to the key.

  III

  I come now to that portion of my account which must remain unfortunately obscure, for I cannot always be sure of the precise order or meaning of the events in which I took part. Disturbed as I was by Whateley’s rigmarole of superstitious fear, I went directly back to my cousin’s house and turned to the strange old books which constituted his library. I sought some further clue to Whateley’s curious beliefs, and yet, I had no sooner picked up one of the books than I was once again filled with the unshakable conviction that this search was futile, for what does it gain a man to read that which he already knows? And what they think who know nothing of these things— what do they matter? For it seemed as if I saw again that strange landscape with its titanic amorphous beings, and it was as if I heard again the chanting of alien names, hinting of terrible power, a chanting accompanied by a fluting of music, and a choral ululation from throats which were not human.

  This illusion lasted but momentarily, only long enough to deflect me from my purpose. I abandoned any further examination of my cousin’s book, and after a light lunch I made another attempt to pursue my inquiry into my cousin’s disappearance, with such lack of success that I gave it up in mid-afternoon and returned to the house in an indecisive frame of mind, no longer so certain that the men from the sheriff’s office had not done all in their power to trace Abel. And, though my resolve was not diminished, I began for the first time to have grave doubts of my ability to carry on.

  That night I heard strange voices once again.

  Or perhaps I should not say “strange”, for I had heard them before; they were unidentifiable and alien, and once again their source was a mystery to me. But that night the whippoorwills were louder than ever before; their cries rang piercingly in the house and in the Pocket outside. The voices began, I should judge, at about nine o’clock. It was a cloudy night, with great grey banks pressing close upon the hills and the valley, and the air was moist; its very moisture, however, increased the loudness of the whippoorwills and intensified the strange voiced which welled forth suddenly, without preamble, as once before—outré, unintelligible, eldritch—they were all that and more, defying description. And once again there was the effect as of a litany, with the chorus of whippoorwills swelling forth as
if in answer to every chanted sentence or phrase, an unbearable cacophony of noise that rose to frightful cataclysms of sound.

  For a while I strove to make something out of the alien voices which throbbed in the room, but they were not coherent, they had the sound of gibberish, despite my inmost conviction that, far from gibberish, they were significant and ominous, beautiful and terrible, suggestive and fraught with meaning far beyond my ability to grasp. Nor did I any longer much care from whence they came; I knew that they rose from somewhere within the house, but whether by virtue of some natural phenomenon or by other agency, I could not determine. They were the product of darkness, or—and I could not gainsay the possibility—they might well have arisen in a consciousness deeply disturbed by the demoniac crying of the whippoorwills, making their terrible bedlam on all sides, filling valley and house and mind with nothing but their thunder, piercing and rasping, the constant, shrilling Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!

  I lay in a state akin to catalepsy, listening:

  “Lllllll-nglui, nnnn-lagl, fhtagn-nagh, ai Yog-Sothoth!”

  The whippoorwills answered in a rolling crescendo of sound that flowed upon the house, broke against it, invaded it; and in the recession of voices, the echo came back from the hills, crashing upon my consciousness with only slightly diminished force.

  “Ygnaiih! Y’bthnk. EEE-ya-ya-ya-yahaaahaahaa-haaa!”

  And again the explosion of sound, the incessant Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! beating upon the night and the cloudy darkness like the throbbing of thousands upon thousands of wild drums!

  Mercifully, I lost consciousness.

  The human body and mind can tolerate only so much before oblivion comes, and with oblivion that night came a dream-structure of unutterable power and terror. I dreamed I was in a far place, a place of vast monolithic buildings, inhabited not by men, but by beings apart from the wildest imagination of men, a land of great unknown tree ferns, of Calamites and Sigillaria surrounding the fantastic buildings of that place, of fearsome forests of trees and other growths belonging to no known terrestrial place.

  Here and there rose colossi of black stone, deep in places where perpetual twilight held sway, and in some areas there were basaltic ruins of incredible age. And in such nightheld places, the constellations which shone forth resembled no known map of the heavens I had ever seen, nor did the topography of the land in those places bear any resemblances to anything I had known, save only certain artists’ conceptions of earth in prehistoric times dating far beyond the Paleozoic period.

  Of the beings who inhabited the dream I remember only that they were of no fixed shape, gigantic in size, and possessed of appendages which were in the nature of tentacles, but afforded locomotion as well as the power to grasp and hold objects; and there appendages were capable of being retracted in one place and of coming forth in another. They were the inhabitants of the monolithic buildings, and many of them were inert in sleep, at which they were attended by foetal beings considerable smaller in size, but of related structure in that they too were capable of changing shape. They were of a horrible, fungoid color, not flesh-colored at all; in this they resembled the color of many of the buildings, and at times they appeared to alter horribly in shape, as if in caricature of the curvilinear types of masonry so prevalent in various parts of that dream-world.

  Strangely, the chanting and the crying of the whippoorwills continued as an integral part of the dream, but in perspective, rising and falling in the background, as in the distance. And it seemed, moreover, as if I, too, existed in that strange place, but on a different plane, as if I, too, served one of the Great Ones there, going forth into the fearsome darkness of the alien forests to slaughter beasts and open their veins so that the Great Ones might feed and grow in other dimensions but that of their weird world.

  How long the dream lasted, I could not say. I slept all night, and yet was tired out of all proportion when I woke, as if I had worked most of the night and got but little sleep. I dragged myself wearily to the kitchen and fried myself some bacon and eggs, after which I sat listlessly to eat them. However, breakfast with several cups of black coffee gave me new life, and I rose from the table feeling refreshed.

  While I was outside for wood, the telephone rang. It was Hough’s ring, but I hurried in to listen.

  I recognized Hester Hutchins’ voice at once, having become accustomed to her ever-wagging tongue. “An’ they do say es thar was six, seven kilt. The bes’ caows in his herd, Mr. Osborn said. They were up in thet south forty—thet’s his nearest pasture to Harrop’s Pocket. Gawd knows haow many others would o’ bin kilt if twa’n’t fer the rest o’ the herd bustin’ down the fence an’ gittin’ daown to the barn. Thet’s haow come Osborn’s hired man, Andy Baxter, went up to the pasture with a lantern an’ seen ’em. Jest like them Corey caows, an’ poor Bert Giles—throats all tore aout, an’ them poor beasts beat up suthin’ terrible! Gawd knows whut’s loose in the Pocket, Vinnie, but suthin’s got to be done or we’ll all be kilt. I knowed them whippoorwills was acallin’ for somebody’s soul, an’ they got poor Bert’s. They’re still acallin’ an’ I know whut thet means, an’ you do, too, Vinnie Hough—they’s to be more souls a-comin’ to them whippoorwills afore the moon changes onct more.”

  “Gawd-a-mercy! I’m goin’ straight to Boston, soon’s I kin git away.”

  I knew the sheriff would stop in again that day, and I was ready for him when he came. I had heard nothing. I explained that I had been exhausted the night before but had managed to sleep in spite of the din made by the whippoorwills. In turn, he very considerately told me what had been done to Osborn’s cows. Seven of them had been slaughtered, he said, and there was something very strange about it, for no cow had bled very much, despite the way in which each throat was ripped. And, in spite of the bestial manner of the attack, it seemed plain that it had been done by a man, for there were fragmentary footprints in evidence, unfortunately not complete enough to warrant attempting to make any kind of observation. However, he went on in confidence, one of his men had had his eye on Amos Whateley for some time; Amos had been making very queer remarks, and his actions had been those of a man who expected that he was being followed or something. The sheriff said this wearily, for he was tired, having been up since he had been called to Osborn’s farm. And what did I know about Whateley? he went on.

  I shook my head and confessed that I knew all too little about any of my neighbors. “But I’ve noticed his queer talk,” I admitted. “Whenever I’ve talked with him, he’s said very strange things.”

  The sheriff leaned forward eagerly. “Did he ever talk or mutter about ‘feeding’ someone something?”

  I admitted that Amos had so talked.

  The sheriff seemed satisfied. He took his leave after indirectly scoring me for my own conspicuous lack of success in discovering what had happened to my cousin Abel. I was not unduly surprised at his suspicions of Amos Whateley. And yet there was something in sharp conflict with the sheriff’s theory deep in my own awareness, and a kind of uneasiness burgeoned there, like the nagging memory of something left undone.

  My exhaustion did not leave me during the day, and I did little work, although I found it necessary to wash some of my clothing which had somehow become rust-stained. I took time, too, to examine my cousin’s work on the fish-netting, and it occurred to me that he had designed it to catch something. And what more likely than that it was the whippoorwills, which must have driven him, too, to his wits’ end now and then? Or perhaps he knew more of their habits than I did, and perhaps he had a better reason to try to catch them than their constant crying.

  I slept when I could during the day, though from time to time I listened to the current of frightened talk that went on over the telephone. There was no end to it; the telephone rang all day long, and sometimes the men talked to each other, as well as the women, who had heretofore monopolized the wires. They talked about pooling herds of cows and setting a watch on them, but then, fea
rful, none wanted to watch alone; they spoke of keeping their cows in the barns at night, and I gathered that they had decided to do this. The women, however, wanted no one to go out after dark for any reason whatsoever.

  “It dun’t come by day,” Emma Whateley insisted to Marie Osborn. “Ain’t never bin nuthin’ done by day. So I say a body should stay close to hum onct the sun gits down over the hills.”

  And Lavinia Hough had taken off for Boston, just as she said she would, with the children.

  “Up an’ took them kids an’ let Laban be thar,” said Hester Hutchins. “But he ain’t alone; he’s fetched a man out from Arkham to set with him. Oh, it’s a turrible thing, it’s a Gawd’s punishment on us, an’ the wusst is nobody knows whut It looks like nor whar It comes from ’r nuthin’.”

  An the superstition about the cows being drained of blood was repeated again.

  “They said them caows didn’t bleed much, an’ that’s why—they didn’t hev no blood left to bleed,” said Angeline Wheeler. “Gawd, whut’s a-goin’ to happen to us all? We can’t jest set her an’ wait till we’re all kilt.”

  This frightened conversation was a sort of whistling in the dark; the telephones gave them, men as well as women, a sense of being less isolated, less solitary. That none of them ever called me I did not ponder; I was an outsider, and people from outside are seldom taken into country circles like that of my neighbors around Harrop’s Pocket in short of ten years’ time—if then. Toward evening I no longer listened on the telephone, being still very tired.

  On the next night but one the voices came again.

  And the dream came, too. Once more I was in a vast place of strange basalt buildings and fearsome forest growths. And I knew that in that place I was a Chosen One, proud to serve the Ancient Ones, belonging to that greatest of them all, who was like the others and yet unlike them, that one among them who alone could take the form of a congeries of shining globes, the Guardian of the Threshold, the Keeper of the Gate, Great Yog-Sothoth, biding his time to return to his one-time terrestrial plane, where I must continue to serve him. Oh, the power and the glory! Oh, the wonder and the terror! Oh, the eternal bliss! And I heard the whippoorwills crying, their voices rising and falling in the background of that place, while the chanters cried out under the alien stars, under the alien heaven, into the gulfs and to the shrouded peaks, cried out aloud—