Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  And I will say here, because it is important to my story, that I afterward learned that our Fischer and Reuter relatives considered me exceptionally intelligent for my tender age. My father and mother always believed this, but one must allow for parental bias.

  In 1917 my father profitably sold his business and brought his tiny family west, to build with his own hands a last home in this land of sunlight, crumbling sandstones, and sea-spawned hills, Southern California. This was in part because doctors had advised it as essential for the sake of my mother’s failing health, slow victim of the dread tubercular scourge, but my father had always had a strong yearning for clear skies, year-round heat, and the primeval sea, a deep conviction that his destiny somehow lay west and was involved with Earth’s hugest ocean: from which perhaps the moon was torn.

  My father’s deep-seated longing for this outwardly wholesome and bright, inwardly sinister and eaten-away landscape, where Nature herself presents the naïve face of youth masking the corruptions of age, has given me much food for thought, though it is in no way a remarkable longing. Many people migrate here, healthy as well as sick, drawn by the sun, the promise of perpetual summer, the broad if arid fields. The only unusual circumstance worthy of note is that there is a larger sprinkling than might be expected of persons of professed mystical and utopian bent. The Brothers of the Rose, the Theosophists, the Foursquare Gospelers, the Christian Scientists, Unity, the Brotherhood of the Grail, the spiritualists, the astrologers—all are here and many more besides. Believers in the need of return to primitive states and primitive wisdoms, practitioners of pseudo-disciplines dictated by pseudo-sciences—yes, even a few overly sociable hermits—one finds them everywhere; the majority awaken only my pity and distaste, so lacking in logic and avid for publicity are they. At no time—and let me emphasize this—have I been at all interested in their doings and in their ignorantly parroted principles, except possibly from the viewpoint of comparative psychology.

  And they were brought here by that excessive love of sunlight which characterizes most faddists of any sort and that urge to find an unsettled, unorganized land in which utopias might take root and burgeon, untroubled by urbane ridicule and tradition-bred opposition—the same urge that led the Mormons to desert-guarded Salt Lake City, their paradise of Deseret. This seems an adequate explanation, even without bringing in the fact that Los Angeles, a city of retired farmers and small merchants, a city made hectic by the presence of the uncouth motion-picture industry, would naturally attract charlatans of all varieties. Yes, that explanation is still sufficient to me, and I am rather pleased, for even now I should hate to think that those hideously alluring voices a-mutter with secrets from beyond the rim of the cosmos necessarily have some dim, continent-wide range.

  (“The carven rim,” they are saying now here in my study. “The proto-shoggoths, the diagramed corridor, the elder Pharos, the dreams of Cutlu …”)

  Settling my mother and myself at a comfortable Hollywood boarding-house, where the activities of the infant film industry provided us with colorful distraction, my father tramped the hills in search of a suitable property, bringing to bear his formidable talent for locating underground water and desirable rock formations. During this period, it occurs to me now, he almost certainly pioneered those trails which it is my own invariable and ever more compulsive wont to walk. Within three months he had found and purchased the property he sought near a predominantly Alsatian and French settlement (a scatter of bungalows, no more) bearing the perhaps exaggeratedly picturesque name Vultures Roost, redolent of the Old West.

  Clearing and excavation of the property revealed an upthrust stratum of fine-grained solid metamorphic rock, while a little boring provided an excellent well, to the incredulous astonishment of his initially hostile neighbors. My father kept his counsel and began, mostly with his own hands alone, to erect a brick structure of moderate size that by its layout and plans promised a dwelling of surpassing beauty. This occasioned more head-shaking and lectures on the unwisdom of building brick structures in a region where earthquakes were not unknown. They called it Fischer’s Folly, I learned later. Little did they realize my father’s skill and the tenacity of his masonry!

  He bought a small truck and scoured the area as far south as Laguna Beach and as far north as Malibu, searching for the kilns that would provide him with bricks and tiles of requisite quality. In the end he sheathed the roof partly with copper, which has turned a beautiful green with the years. During these searches he became closely acquainted with the visionary and remarkably progressive Abbott Kinney, who was building the resort of Venice on the coast ten miles away, and with the swarthy, bright-eyed, unknown master builder Simon Rodia, self-educated like himself. All three men shared a rich vein of the poetry of stone, ceramics, and metals.

  There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man (for my father was that now, his hair whitely grizzled) to enable him to accomplish so much hard labor, for within two years my mother and I were able to move into our new home at Vultures Roost and take up our lives there.

  I was delighted with my new surroundings and to be rejoined with my father, and only resentful of the time I must spend at school, to which my father drove me and from which he fetched me each day. I especially enjoyed rambling, occasionally with my father but chiefly by myself, through the wild, dry, rock-crowned hills, spry despite my twisted foot. My mother was fearful for me, especially because of the hairy brown and black tarantulas one sometimes encountered and the snakes, including venomous rattlers, but I was not to be restrained.

  My father was happy, but also like a man in a dream as he worked unceasingly at the innumerable tasks, chiefly artistic, involved in finishing our home. It was a structure of rich beauty, though our neighbors continued to shake their heads and cluck dubiously at its hexagonal shape, partly rounded roof, thick walls of tightly mortared (though unreinforced) brick, and the area of brightly colored tile and floridly engraved stone. “Fischer’s Folly,” they’d whisper, and chuckle. But swarthy Simon Rodia nodded approvingly when he visited and once Abbott Kinney came to admire, driven in an expensive car by a black chauffeur with whom he seemed on terms of easy friendship.

  My father’s stone engravings were indeed quite fanciful and even a little disconcerting in their subject matter and location. One was in the basement’s floor of natural rock, which he had smoothed. From time to time I’d watch him work on it. Desert plants and serpents seemed to be its subject matter, but as one studied it one became aware that there was much marine stuff too: serrated looping seaweeds, coiling eels, fishes that trailed tentacles, suckered octopus arms, and two giant squid eyes peering from a coral-crusted castle. And in its midst he boldly hewed in a flowery stone script, “The Gate of Dreams.” My childish imagination was fired, but I was a little frightened too.

  It was about this time—1921 or thereabouts—that my sleepwalking began, or at any rate showed signs of becoming disturbingly persistent. Several times my father found me at varying distances from the house along one of the paths I favored in my limping rambles and carried me tenderly back, chilled and shivering, for unlike Kentucky in summer, Southern California nights are surprisingly cold. And more than once I was found huddled and still asleep in our cellar alongside the grotesquely floor-set “Gate of Dreams” bas-relief—to which, incidentally, my mother had taken a dislike which she tried to conceal from my father.

  At that time too my sleeping habits began to show other abnormalities, some of them contradictory. Although an active and apparently healthy boy of ten, I was still sleeping infancy’s twelve hours or more a night. Yet despite this unusual length of slumber coupled with the restlessness my sleepwalking would seem to have indicated, I never dreamed or at any rate remembered dreams upon awakening. And with one notable exception this has been true for my entire life.

  The exception occurred a little later on, when I was eleven or twelve—in 1923 or thereabouts. I remember those few dreams (there were no more than
eight or nine of them) with matchless vividness. How else?—since they were my life’s only ones and since … but I must not anticipate. At the time I was secretive about them, telling neither my father nor my mother, as if for fear my parents might worry or (children are odd!) disapprove, until one final night.

  In my dream I would find myself making my way through low passages and tunnels, all crudely cut or perhaps gnawed from solid rock. Often I felt I was at a great distance under the earth, though why I thought this in my dream I cannot say, except that there was often a sensation of heat and an indescribable feeling of pressure from above. This last sensation was diminished almost to nothing at times, though. And sometimes I felt there were vast amounts of water far above me, though why I suspected this I cannot say, for the strange tunnels were always very dry. Yet in my dreams I came to assume that the burrows extended limitlessly under the Pacific.

  There was no obvious source of illumination in the passages. My dream explanation of how I then managed to see them was fantastic, though rather ingenious. The floor of the tunnels was colored a strange purplish-green. This I explained in my dream as being the reflection of cosmic rays (which were much in the newspapers then, firing my boyish imagination) that came down through the thick rock above from distantmost outer space. The rounded ceiling of the tunnels, on the other hand, had a weird orange-blue glow. This, I seemed to know, was caused by the reflection of certain rays unknown to science that came up through the solid rock from the Earth’s incandescent, constricted core.

  The eerie mixed light revealed to me the strange engravings or ridgy pictures everywhere covering the tunnels’ walls. They had a strong suggestion of the marine to them and also of the monstrous, yet they were strangely generalized, as if they were the mathematical diagrams of oceans and their denizens and of whole universes of alien life. If the dreams of a monster of supernatural mentality could be given visual shape, then they would be like those endless forms I saw on the tunnels’ walls. Or if the dreams of such a monster were half materialized and able to move through such tunnels, they would shape the walls in such fashion.

  At first in my dreams I was not conscious of having a body. I seemed to be a viewpoint floating along the tunnels at a definitely rhythmic rate, now faster, now slower.

  And at first I never saw anything in those tormenting tunnels, though I was continually conscious of a fear that I might—a fear mixed with a desire. This was a most disturbing and exhausting feeling, which I could hardly have concealed upon awakening save that (with one exception) I never woke until my dream had played itself out, as it were, and my feelings were temporarily exhausted.

  And then in my next dream I did begin to see things—creatures—in the tunnels, floating through them in the same general rhythmic fashion as I (or my viewpoint) progressed. They were worms about as long as a man and as thick as a man’s thigh, cylindrical and untapering. From end to end, as many as a centipede’s legs, were pairs of tiny wings, translucent like a fly’s, which vibrated unceasingly, producing an unforgettably sinister low-pitched hum. They had no eyes—their heads were one circular mouth lined with rows of triangular teeth like a shark’s. Although blind, they seemed able to sense each other at short distances and their sudden lurching swerves then to avoid colliding with each other held a particular horror for me. (It was a little like my lurching limp.)

  In my very next dream I became aware of my own dream body. In brief, I was myself one of those same winged worms. The horror I felt was extreme, yet once more the dream lasted until its intensity was damped out and I could awaken with only the memory of terror, still able (I thought) to keep my dreams a secret.

  The next time I had my dream it was to see three of the winged worms writhing in a wider section of tunnel where the sensation of pressure from above was minimal. I was still observer rather than participant, floating in my worm body in a narrower side passageway. How I was able to see while in one of the blind worm bodies, my dream logic did not explain.

  They were worrying a rather small human victim. Their three snouts converged upon and covered his face. Their sinister buzzing had a hungry note and there were sucking sounds.

  Blond hair, white pajamas, and (projecting from the right leg of those) a foot slightly shrunken and twisted sharply inward told me the victim was myself.

  At that instant I was shaken violently, the scene swam, and through it my mother’s huge terrorized face peered down at me with my father’s anxious visage close behind.

  I went into convulsions of terror, flailing my limbs, and I screamed and screamed. It was hours literally before I could be quieted down, and days before my father let me tell them my nightmare.

  Thereafter he made a strict rule: that no one ever try to shake me awake, no matter how bad a nightmare I seemed to be having. Later I learned he’d watch me at such times with knitted brow, suppressing the impulse to rouse me and seeing to it that no one else tried to do so.

  For several nights thereafter I fought sleep, but when my nightmare was never repeated and once more I could never remember having dreamed at all when I wakened, I quieted down and my life, both sleeping and waking, became very tranquil again. In fact, even my sleepwalking became less frequent, although I continued to sleep for abnormally long hours, a practice now encouraged by my father’s injunction that I never be wakened unnaturally.

  But I have since come to wonder whether this apparent diminishment of my unconscious night-wandering were not because I, or some fraction of me, had become more cunningly deceitful. Habits have in any case a way of slipping slowly from the serious notice of those around.

  At times, though, I would catch my father looking at me speculatively, as though he would have dearly liked to talk with me of various deep matters, but in the end he would always restrain this impulse (if I had divined it rightly) and content himself with encouraging me in my school studies and rambling exercise despite the latter’s dangers: there were more rattlesnakes about my favorite paths, perhaps because opossums and raccoons were being exterminated; he made me wear high-laced shoes of stout leather.

  And once or twice I got the impression that he and Simon Rodia were talking secretly about me when the latter visited.

  On the whole my life was a lonely one and has remained so to this day. We had no neighbors who were friends, no friends who were neighbors. At first this was because of the relative isolation of our residence and the suspicion that Germanic names uniformly called forth in the years following the World War. But it continued even after we began to have more neighbors, tolerant newcomers. Perhaps things would have been different if my father had lived longer. (His health was good save for a touch of eyestrain—dancing colors he’d see briefly.)

  But that was not to be. On that fatal Sunday in 1925 he had joined me on one of my customary walks and we had just reached one of my favorite spots when the ground gave way under his feet and he vanished from beside me, his startled exclamation dropping in pitch as he fell rapidly. For once his instinct for underground conditions had deserted him. There was a little scraping rumble as a few rocks and some gravel landslided, then silence. I approached the weed-fringed black hole on my belly and peered down fearfully.

  From very far below (it sounded) I heard my father call faintly, “Georg! Get help!” His voice now had a strained, higher-pitched sound, as if his chest were being constricted.

  “Father! I’m coming down,” I cried, cupping my hands about my mouth, and I had thrust my twisted foot into the hole searching for support, when his frantic yet clearly enunciated words came up, his voice still higher-pitched and even more strained, as if he had to make a great effort to get sufficient breath for them: “Do not come down, Georg—you’ll start an avalanche. Get help … a rope!”

  After a moment’s hesitation I withdrew my leg and set off for home at a hobbling gallop. My horror was heightened (or perhaps a little relieved) by a sense of the dramatic—early that year we had listened for weeks on the little crystal set I’d built to the rad
ioed reports of the long protracted, exciting efforts (ultimately unsuccessful) to rescue Floyd Collins from where he’d got himself trapped in Sand Cave near Cave City, Kentucky. I suppose I anticipated some such drama for my father.

  Most fortunately a young doctor was making a call in our neighborhood and he was foremost in the party of men I soon guided back to where my father had disappeared. No sounds at all came from the black hole, although we called and called, and I remember that a couple of men had begun to look at me dubiously, as if I’d invented the whole thing, when the courageous young doctor insisted against the advice of most on being lowered into the hole—they’d brought a strong rope and an electric flashlight.

  He was a long time going down, descending about fifty feet in all while calls went back and forth, and almost as long being drawn up. When he emerged all smeared with sandy dirt—great orange smudges—it was to tell us (he made a point of laying his hand on my shoulder; I could see my mother hurrying up between two other women) that my father was inextricably wedged in down there with little more than his head exposed and that he was, to an absolute certainty, dead.

  At that moment there was another grating rumble, and the black hole collapsed upon itself. One of the men standing on its edge was barely jerked to safety. My mother shrieked, threw herself down on the shaking brown weeds, and was drawn back too.

  In the subsequent weeks it was decided that my father’s body could not be recovered. Some bags of concrete and sand were dumped into what was left of the hole to seal it. My mother was forbidden to erect a monument at the spot, but in some sort of compensation—I didn’t understand the logic of it—Los Angeles County presented her with a cemetery plot elsewhere. (It now holds her own body.) An unofficial funeral service conducted by a Latin-American priest was eventually held at the spot, and Simon Rodia, defying the injunction, put up a small, nonsectarian ovoid monument of his own matchlessly tough white concrete bearing my father’s name and beautifully inset with a vaguely aquatic or naval design in fragmented blue and green glass. It is still there.