The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

  But there was time for me to delve into the secrets of my uncle’s books, to read further into his notes. So much was clear—he had belief enough to have begun a search for sunken R’lyeh, the city or the kingdom—one could not be sure which it was, or whether indeed it ringed half the earth from the coast of Massachusetts in the Atlantic to the Polynesian Islands on the Pacific—to which Cthulhu had been banished, dead and yet not dead,—“Dead Cthulhu lies dreaming!”—as it read in more than one account, waiting, biding his time to rise and rebel again, to strike once more for dominion against the rule of the Elder Gods, for a world and universes of his own persuasion—for is it not true that if evil triumphs, then evil becomes the law of life, and it is good that must be fought, the rule of the majority establishing the norm, and other than that being abnormal, or, by the way of mankind, the bad, the abhorrent?

  My uncle had sought R’lyeh, and he had written disturbingly of how he had done so. He had gone down into the Atlantic’s depths, from his home here on the coast, gone down off Devil’s Reef and beyond. But there was no mention of how he had done so. By diving equipment? Bathysphere? Of these I had found no evidence whatsoever at the house. It was on these explorations that he had gone during those periods when he had been so long missing from the house on the coast. And yet there had been no mention of any kind of craft, either, nor had my uncle left any such thing in his estate.

  If R’lyeh was the object of my uncle’s search, what then was Ada Marsh’s? This remained to be seen, and to the end of discovering it, I allowed some of my uncle’s least informative notes to lie on the library table on the following day. I managed to watch her when she came upon them, and I was left in no doubt, by her reaction, that this was the object of her search—the cache I had found. She had known of these papers. But how?

  I confronted her. Even before I had a chance to speak, she spoke.

  “You found them!” she cried.

  “How did you know about them?”

  “I knew what he was doing.”

  “The search?”

  She nodded.

  “You can’t believe,” I protested.

  “How can you be so stupid?” she cried angrily. “Did your parents tell you nothing? Your grandfather? How could you have been raised in darkness?” She came close to me, thrust the papers in her hand at me, and demanded, “Let me see the rest of them.”

  I shook my head.

  “Please! They are of no use to you.”

  “We shall see.”

  “Tell me, then—he had begun the search?”

  “Yes. But I do not know how. There is neither a diver’s suit nor a boat.”

  At this she favored me with a glance which was a challenging mingling of pity and contempt.

  “You have not even read all he had written! You haven’t read the books—nothing. Do you know what you’re standing on?”

  “This rug?” I asked wonderingly.

  “No, no—the design, the pattern. It’s everywhere. Don’t you know why? Because it is the great seal of R’lyeh! So much at least he discovered years ago, and was proud to emblazon it here. You stand on what you seek! Look further and find his ring.”

  III

  After Ada Marsh left that day, I turned once more to my uncle’s papers. I did not leave them until long past midnight, but by that time I had gone through most of them cursorily, and some of them with the closest attention. I found it difficult to believe what I read, yet clearly my Uncle Sylvan had not only believed it, but seemed actually to have taken some part in it himself. He had dedicated himself early in life to the search for the sunken kingdom, he professed openly a devotion to Cthulhu, and, most suggestive of all, his writings contained many times chilling hints of enounters— sometimes in the ocean’s depths, sometimes in the streets of legend-haunted Arkham, an ancient, gambrel-roofed town which lay inland from Innsmouth, not far from the coast along the Miskatonic River, or in nearby Dunwich, or even Innsmouth—with men—or beings which were not men—I could hardly tell which—who believed as he did and were bound in the same dark bondage to this resurgent myth from the distant past.

  And yet, despite my iconoclasm, there was, too, an edge of belief I could not diminish. Perhaps it was because of the strange insinuations in the notes—the half-statements, which were meant only for reference to his own knowledge, and thus never clear, for he referred to something he knew too well to set down—the insinuations about the unhallowed marriages of Obadiah Marsh and “three others”—could there have been a Phillips among them?—and the subsequent discovery of photographs of the Marsh women, Obadiah’s widow—a curiously flat-faced woman, very dark of skin, with a wide, thin-lipped mouth—and the younger Marshes, all of whom resembled their mother—together with odd references to their curious hopping gait, so much a characteristic of “those who descended from those who came back alone from the sinking of the Cory,” as Uncle Sylvan put it. What he meant to say was unmistakable— Obadiah Marsh had married in Ponape a woman who was not a Polynesian, yet lived there, and belonged to a sea-race which was only semihuman, and his children and his children’s children had borne the stigmata of that marriage, which had in turn led to the holocaust visited upon Innsmouth in 1928, and to the destruction of so many members of the old Innsmouth families. Though my uncle wrote in the most casual manner, there was a horror behind his words, and the echo of disaster rolled out from behind the sentences and paragraphs of his writing.

  For these of whom he wrote were allied to the Deep Ones; like them, they were amphibious creatures. Of how far the accursed taint went, he did not speculate, nor was there ever wordto settle his own status in relation to them. Captain Obadiah Marsh— presumably also Cyrus Phillips, and two others of the Cory’s crew who had remained behind in Ponape—certainly shared none of the curious traits of their wives and children; but whether the taint went beyond their children, none could say. Was it this Ada Marsh had meant when she had said to me, “You are one of us!”? Or had she reference to some even darker secret? Presumably my grandfather’s abhorrence of the sea was due to his knowledge of his father’s deeds; he, at least, has successfully resisted the dark heritage.

  But my uncle’s papers were on the one hand too diffuse to make a coherent statement, and on the other too plain to enlist immediate belief. What disturbed me immediately most of all were the repeated hints that his home, this home, was a “haven,” a “point” of contact, an “opening to that which lies below”; and the speculations about the “breathing” of the house and the rocky bluff which were so often to be found in the early pages of his notes, and to which no reference whatsoever was made later on. What he had set down was baffling and challenging, fearsome and wonderful; it filled me with awe and at one and the same time an angry disbelief and a wild wish to believe, to know.

  I sought everywhere to find out, but was only baffled the more. People in Innsmouth were close-mouthed; some of them actually shunned me—crossed the street at my approach, and in the Italian district frankly crossed themselves as if to ward off the evil eye. No one offered any information, and even at the public library I could obtain no books or records which might help, for these, the librarian told me, had been confiscated and destroyed by government men after the fire and explosions of 1928. I sought in other places—I learned even darker secrets at Arkham and Dunwich, and in the great library of Miskatonic University found at last the fountainhead of all books of dark lore: the half-fabled Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, which I was allowed to read only under the watchful eye of a librarian’s assistant.

  It was then, two weeks after my discovery of my uncle’s papers, that I found his ring. This was where one would least have expected to find it, and yet where it was bound to be—in a small packet of his personal belongings returned to the house by the undertaker and left unwrapped in his bureau drawer. The ring was of silver, a massive thing, inlaid with a milky stone which resembled pearl, but was not, and inlaid with the seal of R’lyeh.

 
I examined it closely. There was nothing extraordinary about it, save its size—to look upon; the wearing of it, however, carried with it unimaginable results. For I had no sooner put it on my finger than it was as if new dimensions opened up to me—or as if the old horizons were pushed back limitlessly. All my senses were made more acute. The very first thing I noticed was my awareness of the susurrus of the house and the rock, now one with the sea’s slow movement; so that it was as if the house and the rock were rising and falling with the movement of the water, and it seemed as if I heard from below the house itself the rushing and retreating of water.

  At the same time, and perhaps even more importantly, I was aware of a psychic awakening. With the assumption of the ring, I became cognizant of the pressure of unseen forces, potent beyond the telling, as were this house the focal point of influences beyond my comprehension; I stood, in short, as were I a magnet to draw elemental forces from all about me, and these rushed in upon me with such impress that I felt like an island in the midst of the sea, with a raging hurricane centered upon it, a tempestuous tearing at me until I heard almost with relief the very real sound of a horrible, animallike voice rising in a ghastly ululation—not from above or beside me, but from below!

  I tore the ring from my finger, and at once all subsided. The house and the rock returned to quiet and solitude; the winds and the waters which had moved all about me faded and died away; the voice I had heard retreated and was still; the extrasensory perception I had experienced was ended, and once more all seemed to lie waiting upon my further act. So my dead uncle’s ring was a talisman and a ring of wizardry; it was the key to his knowledge and the door to other realms of being.

  It was by means of the ring that I discovered my Uncle’s way to the sea. I had long sought the path by which he went to the beach, but there was none sufficiently worn to suggest its constant use. There were paths down the rocky declivity; in some places steps had been cut long ago, so that a man could reach the water from the house on the promontory, but there was nowhere a place that might have been used for landing craft. The shore here was deep; I swam in the waters there several times, always with a wild sense of exultation, so great was my pleasure in the sea; but there were many rocks, and such beach as there was lay away from the promontory, around the coves, either to north or south, almost too great a distance to swim, unless one were a very capable swimmer, such as I learned—somewhat to my surprise—that I was.

  I had meant to ask Ada Marsh about the ring. It was she who had told me of its existence, but ever since that day I had refused her access to my Uncle’s papers, she had stopped coming to the house. True, I had seen her lurking about from time to time, or spied her car parked along the road which led past my property rather far to the west of the house, and so knew that she prowled the vicinity. Once I had gone into Innsmouth to look for her, but she was not at her home, and my inquiries brought me only open hostility from most of the populace, and sly, meaningful glances I could not correctly interpret from others—those shambling, half-derelict people who lived along the coast streets and byways.

  So it was not due to her help that I found my uncle’s way to the sea. I had put on the ring one day, and, drawn to the sea, was bent on climbing down to the water’s edge, when I found myself, while in the act of crossing the great central room of the house, virtually unable to leave it, so strong was its pull upon the ring. I ceased to try, presently, recognizing that a psychic force was manifest, and simply stood, waiting for guidance; so that, when I was impelled toward a singularly repellent work of carved wood, a primitive piece representing some hideous batrachian hybrid, affixed to a pedestal along one wall of the study, I yielded to impulse, went over to it, seized hold of it, and pushed, pulled, and finally turned it right and left. It gave to the left.

  Instantly there was a creaking of chains, a clanking of gears, and the entire section of the study floor covered by the rug bearing the seal of R’lyeh came up like a great trap-door. I went wonderingly over to it, my pulse quickening with excitement. And I looked down into the pit below—a great, yawning depth, into the darkness of which a continuing spiral of steps had been hewn out of the solid rock upon which the house stood. Did it lead to water below? I selected a book at random from my uncle’s set of Dumas and dropped it; then I stood listening for any sound from below. It came at last: a splash—distantly.

  So, with the utmost caution, I crept down the interminable stairs, down into the smell of the sea—small wonder I had felt that the sea was in the house!—down into the dank coolness of a watery place, until I could feel the moisture on the walls and the steps underfoot, down into the sound of restless water below, the sloshing and rushing of the sea, until I came to where the stairs ended, at the very edge of the water, in a kind of cavern that was large enough to have held the entire house in which my Uncle Sylvan had lived. And I knew beyond cavil that this was my uncle’s way to the sea, this and no other; though I was as mystified as ever to find even here no evidence of boat or diving gear, but only footprints—and, seen in the light of the matches I struck, something more—the long, slithered marks and the blobs where some monstrous entity had rested, marks which made me to think with prickling scalp and goose-fleshed skin of some of those hideous representations brought to the great room above me by my Uncle Sylvan and others before him from the mysterious islands of Polynesia.

  How long I stood there, I do not know. For there, at the water’s edge, with the ring bearing the seal of R’lyeh on my finger, I heard from the depths of the water below sounds of movement and life, coming from a great distance indeed, from outward, which is to say, from the direction of the sea, and from below, so that I suspected the existence of some sort of passage to the sea, either immediately at hand, by means of a subaqueous cavern, or below this level, for the cavern in which I stood was ringed around, so far as I could see in the wan glow of the matches I lit, with solid rock, and the movement of the water indicated the movement of the sea, which could not have been coincidental. So the opening was outward, and I must find it without delay.

  I climbed back up the stairs, closed the opening once more, and hurried to my car for a journey to Boston. I returned late that night with a diving helmet and a portable oxygen tank, ready to descend next day into the sea below the house. I removed the ring no more, and that night I dreamed great dreams of ancient lore, of cities on distant stars and magnificent spired settlements in far, fabulous places of the earth—in the unknown Antarctic, high in mountainous Tibet, far beneath the surface of the sea; I dreamed that I moved among great dwellings in wonder and beauty, amidst others of my kind, and among aliens as friends, aliens whose very aspect might, in waking hours, have congealed the blood in my veins, all here in this nocturnal world given to one cause, the service to those great ones whose minions we were; dreamed through the night of other worlds, other realms of being; of new sensations and incredible, tentacled beings commanding our obedience and worship; dreamed so that I woke next morning exhausted and yet exhilarated, as if in the night I had actually experienced my dreams and yet remained charged with unimaginable strength for greater ordeals to come.

  But I was on the threshold of a greater discovery.

  Late the next afternoon, I donned my swimming trunks, affixed a pair of flippers to my feet, put on the helmet and oxygen tanks, and descended to the water’s edge below the house. Even now I find it difficult to write of what befell me without wonder and incredulity. I lowered myself cautiously into that water, feeling for bottom, and, finding it, walked outward toward the sea, at the bottom of a cavern many times the height of a man, walked outward until suddenly I came to its end, and there, without warning, I stepped off into space, and fell slowly through the water toward the ocean floor, a grey world of rocks and sand and aquatic growth that wove and writhed eerily in the dim light which penetrated that depth.

  Here I was sharply conscious of the water’s pressure, and beginning to wonder, too, about the weight of the helmet and oxygen tank whe
n the time came for me to rise again. Perhaps the need of finding some place by means of which to walk out on to the shore would preclude any further search; yet, even as I thought this, I was impelled ever outward, walking away from the shore and bearing south, out from Innsmouth.

  It dawned upon me with horrifying suddenness that I was being drawn as by a magnet, even against my better judgment, for the oxygen in my tanks would not last long, and would need to be replenished before I could hope to return, if I went very far out from the shore line. Yet I was helpless to prevent myself from going seaward; it was as if some power beyond my control were drawing me away from the shore, outward and down, for the land beneath the sea there sloped gently downward, in a direction southeast of the house on the rock; in this direction I went steadily now, without pause, even though I was aware of a growing panic—I must turn about, must begin to find my way back. To swim up to the cave would require almost superhuman effort, despite the lightening pressure of the depths to start me on my way; to reach the foot of the stairs in the pit below the house, at a time when my oxygen was surely all but gone, would be almost impossible, if I did not turn without delay.

  Yet something there was would not permit me to turn. I moved ever onward, outward, as if by a design imposed upon me by a power greater than my own. I had no alternative, I must go ahead, and all the while my alarm grew, I found myself in violent conflict between what I wished to do and what I must do, and the oxygen in my tanks diminished with every step. Several times I vaulted upward swimming vigorously; but, while there was no difficulty about swimming—indeed, I seemed to swim with almost miraculous ease—always I came back to the ocean floor, or found myself swimming outward.