Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  And yet the explanation was never seriously questioned, although there was later an official investigation into the disaster. Presumably because human beings are afraid of mysteries for which there is absolutely no explanation, the mind needs some solution, no matter how absurd, to reassure it.

  There was another item in the evening paper that at first seemed irrelevant. The headline ran: “Did explosion release mystery gas?” It was only a short paragraph, which stated that many people in the area had awakened that morning with bad headaches and a feeling of lassitude, apparently signs of an impending attack of influenza. These had cleared up later in the day. Had the explosion released some gas, asked the reporter, that produced these symptoms? The newspaper’s “scientific correspondent” added a note saying that sulphur dioxide could produce exactly these symptoms, and that several people had noticed such a smell in the night. Nitroglycerine, of course, contains a small quantity of sulphuric acid, which would account for the smell.…

  Urquart said, “Soon find out about that, anyway,” and rang the Southport weather bureau. They rang us back ten minutes later with the answer; the wind had been blowing from the northeast in the night. And Llandalffen lies to the north of the site of the explosion.

  And still neither of us saw the significance of the item. We wasted hours searching through my translation of the Voynich manuscript for clues, then through thirty or so books on Mu and related subjects.

  And then, about to reach down another volume on Lemuria and Atlantis, my eye fell on Sacheverell Sitwell’s book Poltergeists. I stopped and stared. My mind groped for some fact I had half-forgotten. Then it came.

  “My god, Urquart,” I said, “I’ve just thought of something. Where do these creatures get their energy?” He looked at me blankly. “Is it their own natural energy? You need a physical body to generate physical energy. But how about poltergeists …” And then he understood, too. “Poltergeists” take energy from human beings, usually from adolescent girls. One school of thought believes that poltergeists have no independent existence; they are some kind of psychic manifestation from the unconscious mind of the adolescent, an explosion of frustration or craving for attention. The other school believes that they are “spirits” who need to borrow energy from an emotionally disturbed person; Sitwell cites cases of poltergeist disturbances in houses that have remained empty for long periods.

  Could this be why so many people in the area felt tired and “fluey” when they woke up—because the energy for the explosion came from them?

  If this was so, then the danger was not as serious as we had believed. It meant that the Lloigor had no energy of their own; they had to draw it from people—presumably sleeping people. Their powers were therefore limited.

  The same thought struck us both at the same time. Except, of course, that the world is full of people.…

  Nevertheless, we both felt suddenly more cheerful. And in this new frame of mind, we faced our fundamental task; to make the human race aware of the Lloigor. They were not indestructible, or they would not have bothered to destroy Chickno for talking about them. It might be possible to destroy them with an underground nuclear explosion. The fact that they had remained dormant for so many centuries meant that their power was limited. If we could produce definite proof of their existence, then the possibility of countering the menace was high.

  The obvious starting point was the Llandalffen explosion: to make the public aware that it pointed unmistakably to the reality of these hidden forces. In a way, Chickno’s death was the best thing that could have happened; they had shown their hand. We decided to visit the explosion site again in the morning, and to compile a dossier on it. We would interview the citizens of Llandalffen and find out whether any of them really had smelled sulphur dioxide in the night, and whether they would persist in the story when we pointed out that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. Urquart knew a few Fleet Street journalists who had taken a vague interest in the occult and supernatural; he would contact them and hint at a big story.

  When I returned to my hotel late that night, I felt happier than for many days. And I slept deeply and heavily. When I woke up, it was already long past breakfast time, and I felt exhausted. I attributed this to my long sleep, until I tried to walk to the bathroom and found that my head throbbed as if I had picked up a flu germ. I took two aspirins, had a shave, then went downstairs. To my relief, no one else showed signs of a similar exhaustion. Coffee and buttered toast in the lounge refreshed me slightly; I decided that I was suffering from ordinary strain. Then I rang Urquart.

  Mrs Dolgelly said, “I’m afraid he’s not up yet, sir. He’s not feeling too well this morning.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Nothing much. He just seems very tired.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said. I told the desk to ring me a taxi; I was far too tired to walk.

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting at Urquart’s bedside. He looked and felt even worse than I did.

  “I hate to suggest this,” I said, “feeling as we both do, but I think we’d better get out of this place as soon as possible.”

  “Couldn’t we wait until tomorrow?” he asked.

  “It will be worse tomorrow. They’ll exhaust us until we die of the first minor illness we pick up.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  Although it all seemed too troublesome for words, I managed to get back to the hotel, pack my bags, and order a taxi to the station in Cardiff, where we could catch a London train at three o’clock. Urquart encountered more difficulty than I did; Mrs. Dolgelly showed unexpected strength of mind and refused to pack a case for him. He rang me, and I dragged myself back there again, wanting nothing so much as to climb back into bed. But the effort revived me; before midday, the headache had vanished, and I was feeling less exhausted, although oddly light-headed. Mrs. Dolgelly believed my explanation of an urgent telegram that made our journey a matter of life and death, although she was convinced that Urquart would collapse on the way to London.

  That night, we slept in the Regent Palace Hotel. And in the morning, we both woke up feeling perfectly normal. It was Urquart who said, as we waited for our egg and bacon at breakfast, “I think we’re winning, old boy.”

  But neither of us really believed it.

  And from this point on, my story ceases to be a continuous narrative, and becomes a series of fragments, and a record of frustration. We spent weeks in the British Museum searching for clues, and later in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Books on cults in the South Seas indicate that many traditions of the Lloigor survive there, and it is well known that they will one day return and reclaim their world. One text quoted by Leduc and Poitier says that they will cause a “tearing madness” to break out among those they wish to destroy, and their footnote says that “tearing,” as used in this context, means to tear with the teeth, like a man eating a chicken leg. Von Storch has records of a Haitian tribe in which the menfolk became possessed of a demon that led many of them to kill wives and children by tearing at their throats with their teeth.

  Lovecraft also provided us with an important hint. In “The Call of Cthulhu” he mentions a collection of press cuttings, all of which reveal that the “entombed Old Ones” are becoming more active in the world. Later the same day, I happened to meet a girl who worked for a press-cutting agency, who told me that her job was simply to read through dozens of newspapers every day, looking out for mention of the names of clients. I asked her if she could look for items of “unusual” interest—anything hinting at the mysterious or supernatural—and she said she saw no reason why not. I gave her a copy of Charles Fort’s Lo! to give her an idea of the kind of items I wanted.

  Two weeks later, a thin buff envelope arrived, with a dozen or so press clippings in it. Most of them were unimportant—babies with two heads and similar medical curiosities, a man killed in Scotland by an enormous hailstone, reports of an abominable snowman seen on the slopes of Everest—but t
wo or three were more relevant to our search. We immediately contacted several more press-cutting agencies in England, America, and Australia.

  The result was an enormous amount of material, which finally occupied two enormous volumes. It was arranged under various headings: explosions, murders, witchcraft (and the supernatural in general), insanity, scientific observations, miscellaneous. The details of the explosion near Al-Kazimiyah in Iraq are so similar to those of the Llandalffen disaster—even to the exhaustion of the inhabitants of Al-Kazimiyah—that I have no doubt that this area is another stronghold of the Lloigor. The explosion that changed the course of the Tula Gol near Ulan Bator in Mongolia actually led the Chinese to accuse Russia of dropping an atomic bomb. The strange insanity that destroyed ninety percent of the inhabitants of the southern island of Zaforas in the Sea of Crete is still a mystery upon which the Greek military government refuses to comment. The massacre at Panagyurishte in Bulgaria on the night of March 29th, 1968, was blamed, in the first official reports, upon a “vampire cult” who “regarded the nebula in Andromeda as their true home.” These are some of the major events that convinced us that the Lloigor are planning a major attack on the inhabitants of the earth.

  But there were literally dozens—eventually hundreds—of less important items that fitted the pattern. The marine creature that dragged away a trout fisherman in Loch Eilt led to several newspaper articles about “prehistoric survivals”; but the Glasgow edition of the Daily Express (May 18, 1968) printed a story of a witch cult and their worship of a sea-devil with an overpowering smell of decay that recalled Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. An item about the Melksham strangler led me to spend some days there, and I have a signed statement by Detective Sergeant Bradley agreeing that the words the killer used repeatedly before he died were “Ghatanothoa,” “Nug” (another elemental described in Lovecraft), and “Rantegoz.” (Rhan-Tegoth, the beast god, also mentioned in Lovecraft?) Robbins (the strangler) claimed that he was possessed by a “power from underground” when he killed the three women and amputated their feet.

  It would be pointless to continue this list. We hope to have a number of selected items from it—some five hundred in all—published in a volume that will be sent to every member of Congress and every member of the British House of Commons.

  There are certain items that will not be published in this volume, and which are perhaps the most disturbing of all. At 7:45 on December 7th, 1967, a small private aircraft piloted by R. D. Jones of Kingston, Jamaica, left Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for Kingston. There were three passengers aboard. The journey of about five hundred kilometres should have taken two hours. By ten o’clock, Jones’s wife, waiting at the airfield, became alarmed and suggested a search. All attempts at radio contact failed. The search began during the morning. At 1:15, Jones radioed the field for permission to land, apparently unaware of the anxiety he was causing. When asked where he had been, he looked puzzled, and said, “Flying, of course.” When told the time, he was amazed. His own watch showed 10:15. He said he had been flying in low cloud most of the way, but that he had no cause for alarm. Weather reports showed that it was an exceptionally clear day for December, and that he should have encountered no cloud. (Gleaner, Dec. 8th, 1967.)

  The other four cases of which we possess details are similar to this first one, except that one case, the Jeannie, concerned a coast guard vessel off the west coast of Scotland, not an aeroplane. In this instance, the three men on board had encountered heavy “fog,” discovered their radio was not working, and that, for some reason, their watches had stopped. They assumed that it was some odd magnetic disturbance. However, the vessel’s other instruments worked well enough, and in due course, the boat reached Stornoway on Lewis—having been missing for twenty-two hours instead of the three or four assumed by the crew. The naval training plane Blackjack, off the Baja peninsula, Southern California, holds the record; it was missing for three days and five hours. The crew thought it had been away from base for seven hours or so.

  We have been unable to discover what explanation was advanced by the navy for this curious episode, or by the coast guard of Great Britain for the Jeannie interlude. It was probably assumed that the crew got drunk at sea and fell asleep. But there is one thing we soon learned beyond all doubt: human beings do not wish to know about things that threaten their feeling of security and “normality.” This was also a discovery made by the late Charles Fort; he devoted his life to analysing it. And I suppose the books of Fort present classic instances of what William James called “a certain blindness in human beings.” For he invariably gives newspaper references for the incredible events he cites. Why had no one ever taken the trouble to check his references—or some of them—and then write a statement admitting his honesty or denouncing him as a fraud? Mr. Tiffany Thayer once told me that critical readers take the view that there was some “special circumstance” in each case Fort quotes which invalidates it—an unreliable witness here, an inventive reporter there, and so on. And it never strikes anyone that to use this explanation to cover a thousand pages full of carefully assembled facts amounts to pure self-delusion.

  Like most people, I have always made the assumption that my fellow human beings are relatively honest, relatively open-minded, relatively curious. If anything were needed to reassure me about the curiosity about the apparently inexplicable, I would only have to glance at any airport bookstall, with its dozen or so paperbacks by Frank Edwards, et al., all bearing titles like World of the Weird, A Hundred Events Stranger than Fiction, and so on. It comes as a shock to discover that all this is not proof of a genuine open-mindedness about the “supernatural” but only of a desire to be titillated and shocked. These books are a kind of occult pornography, part of a game of “let’s make believe the world is far less dull than it actually is.”

  On August 19th, 1968, Urquart and myself invited twelve “friends” to the rooms we had taken at 83 Gower Street—the house in which Darwin lived immediately after his marriage. We felt the Darwin association was appropriate, for we had no doubt that the date would long be remembered by everyone present. I shall not go into detail except to say that there were four professors—three from London, one from Cambridge—two journalists, both from respectable newspapers, and several members of the professions, including a doctor.

  Urquart introduced me, and I read from a prepared statement, elaborating where I felt it to be necessary. After ten minutes, the Cambridge professor cleared his throat, said “Excuse me,” and hurried out of the room. I discovered later that he thought he had been the victim of a practical joke. The others listened to the end, and for a great deal of the time, I was aware that they were also wondering whether this was all a joke. When they realised that it was not, they became definitely hostile. One of the journalists, a young man just down from the university, kept interrupting with: “Are we to understand.…” One of the ladies got up and left, although I heard later that this was less from disbelief than because she suddenly noticed that there were now thirteen people in the room and thought it unlucky. The young journalist was carrying two of Urquart’s books on Mu, and he quoted from these with deadly effect. Urquart is certainly no master of the English language, and there was a time when I would have seen in them mainly an excuse for witty sarcasm.

  But what was amazing to me was that no one present seemed to accept our “lecture” as a warning. They argued about it as though it were an interesting theory, or perhaps an unusual short story. Finally, after an hour of quibbling about various newspaper cuttings, a solicitor stood up and made a speech that obviously conveyed the general feeling, beginning: “I think Mr. Hough (the journalist) has expressed the misgivings we all feel.…” His main point, which he kept repeating, was that there was no definite evidence. The Llandalffen explosion could have been due to nitroglycerine or even the impact of a shower of meteors. Poor Urquart’s books were treated in a manner that would have made me wince even in my most sceptical days.

  There was no point in going on
. We tape-recorded the whole meeting, and had it typed and duplicated, hoping that one day it will be regarded as almost unbelievable evidence of human blindness and stupidity. And then nothing more happened. The two newspapers decided not to print even a critical account of our arguments. A number of people got wind of the meeting and came to see us—bosomy ladies with ouija boards, a thin man who thought the Loch Ness monster was a Russian submarine, and a number of assorted cranks. This was the point where we decided to move to America. We still entertained some absurd hope that Americans would prove more open-minded than the English.

  It did not take long to disillusion us—although it is true that we found one or two people who were at least willing to suspend judgment on our sanity. But on the whole, the results were negative. We spent an interesting day at the almost defunct fishing village of Cohasset—Lovecraft’s Innsmouth; long enough to discover that it is as active a centre of Lloigor activity as Llandalffen, perhaps more so, and that we would be in extreme danger if we remained there. But we managed to locate Joseph Cullen Marsh, grandson of Lovecraft’s Captain Marsh, who now lived in Popasquash. He told us that his grandfather had died insane, and believed that he had possessed certain “occult” books and manuscripts, which had been destroyed by his widow. This may have been where Lovecraft actually saw the Necronomicon. He also mentioned that Captain Marsh referred to the ancient Old Ones as “the Masters of Time”—an interesting comment in view of the case of the Jeannie, the Blackjack, and the rest.

  Urquart is convinced that the manuscripts were not destroyed—on the curious grounds that such ancient works have a character of their own, and tend to avoid destruction. He is conducting an enormous correspondence with Captain Marsh’s heirs, and his family solicitors, in an attempt to pick up the trail of the Necronomicon.