American supernatural tales

by S. T. Joshi

  Withermore himself meanwhile came and went, changed his place, wandered on quests either definite or vague; and more than once when, taking a book down from a shelf and finding in it marks of Doyne’s pencil, he got drawn on and lost he had heard documents on the table behind him gently shifted and stirred, had literally, on his return, found some letter mislaid pushed again into view, some thicket cleared by the opening of an old journal at the very date he wanted. How should he have gone so, on occasion, to the special box or drawer, out of fifty receptacles, that would help him, had not his mystic assistant happened, in fine prevision, to tilt its lid or pull it half-open, just in the way that would catch his eye?—in spite, after all, of the fact of lapses and intervals in which, could one have really looked, one would have seen somebody standing before the fire a trifle detached and over-erect—somebody fixing one the least bit harder than in life.

  III

  That this auspicious relation had in fact existed, had continued, for two or three weeks, was sufficiently shown by the dawn of the distress with which our young man found himself aware of having, for some reason, from the close of a certain day, begun to miss it. The sign of that was an abrupt surprised sense—on the occasion of his mislaying a marvellous unpublished page which, hunt where he would, remained stupidly irrecoverably lost—that his protected state was, with all said, exposed to some confusion and even to some depression. If, for the joy of the business, Doyne and he had, from the start, been together, the situation had within a few days of his first suspicion of it suffered the odd change of their ceasing to be so. That was what was the matter, he mused, from the moment an impression of mere mass and quantity struck him as taking, in his happy outlook at his material, the place of the pleasant assumption of a clear course and a quick pace. For five nights he struggled; then, never at his table, wandering about the room, taking up his references only to lay them down, looking out of the window, poking the fire, thinking strange thoughts and listening for signs and sounds not as he suspected or imagined, but as he vainly desired and invoked them, he yielded to the view that he was for the time at least forsaken.

  The extraordinary thing thus became that it made him not only sad but in a high degree uneasy not to feel Doyne’s presence. It was somehow stranger he shouldn’t be there than it had ever been he was—so strange indeed at last that Withermore’s nerves found themselves quite illogically touched. They had taken kindly enough to what was of an order impossible to explain, perversely reserving their sharpest state for the return to the normal, the supersession of the false. They were remarkably beyond control when finally, one night after his resisting them an hour or two, he simply edged out of the room. It had now but for the first time become impossible to him to stay. Without design, but panting a little and positively as a man scared, he passed along his usual corridor and reached the top of the staircase. From this point he saw Mrs. Doyne look up at him from the bottom quite as if she had known he would come; and the most singular thing of all was that, though he had been conscious of no motion to resort to her, had only been prompted to relieve himself by escape, the sight of her position made him recognise it as just, quickly feel it as a part of some monstrous oppression that was closing over them both. It was wonderful how, in the mere modern London hall, between the Tottenham Court Road rugs and the electric light, it came up to him from the tall black lady, and went again from him down to her, that he knew what she meant by looking as if he would know. He descended straight, she turned into her own little lower room, and there, the next thing, with the door shut, they were, still in silence and with queer faces, confronted over confessions that had taken sudden life from these two or three movements. Withermore gasped as it came to him why he had lost his friend. “He has been with you?”

  With this it was all out—out so far that neither had to explain and that, when “What do you suppose is the matter?” quickly passed between them, one appeared to have said it as much as the other. Withermore looked about at the small bright room in which, night after night, she had been living her life as he had been living his own upstairs. It was pretty, cosy, rosy; but she had by turns felt in it what he had felt and heard in it what he had heard. Her effect there—fantastic black, plumed and extravagant, upon deep pink—was that of some “decadent” coloured print, some poster of the newest school.

  “You understood he had left me?” he asked.

  She markedly wished to make it clear. “This evening—yes. I’ve made things out.”

  “You knew—before—that he was with me?”

  She hesitated again. “I felt he wasn’t with me. But on the stairs—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well—he passed; more than once. He was in the house. And at your door—”

  “Well?” he went on as she once more faltered.

  “If I stopped I could sometimes tell. And from your face,” she added, “to-night, at any rate, I knew your state.”

  “And that was why you came out?”

  “I thought you’d come to me.”

  He put out to her, on this, his hand, and they thus for a minute of silence held each other clasped. There was no peculiar presence for either now—nothing more peculiar than that of each for the other. But the place had suddenly become as if consecrated, and Withermore played over it again his anxiety. “What is then the matter?”

  “I only want to do the real right thing,” she returned after her pause.

  “And aren’t we doing it?”

  “I wonder. Aren’t you?”

  He wondered too. “To the best of my belief. But we must think.”

  “We must think,” she echoed. And they did think—thought with intensity the rest of that evening together, and thought independently (Withermore at least could answer for himself) during many days that followed. He intermitted a little his visits and his work, trying, all critically, to catch himself in the act of some mistake that might have accounted for their disturbance. Had he taken, on some important point—or looked as if he might take—some wrong line or wrong view? had he somewhere benightedly falsified or inadequately insisted? He went back at last with the idea of having guessed two or three questions he might have been on the way to muddle; after which he had abovestairs, another period of agitation, presently followed by another interview below with Mrs. Doyne, who was still troubled and flushed.

  “He’s there?”

  “He’s there.”

  “I knew it!” she returned in an odd gloom of triumph. Then as to make it clear: “He hasn’t been again with me.”

  “Nor with me again to help,” said Withermore.

  She considered. “Not to help?”

  “I can’t make it out—I’m at sea. Do what I will I feel I’m wrong.”

  She covered him a moment with her pompous pain. “How do you feel it?”

  “Why by things that happen. The strangest things. I can’t describe them—and you wouldn’t believe them.”

  “Oh yes I should!” Mrs. Doyne cried.

  “Well, he intervenes.” Withermore tried to explain. “However I turn I find him.”

  She earnestly followed. “‘Find’ him?”

  “I meet him. He seems to rise there before me.”

  Staring, she waited a little. “Do you mean you see him?”

  “I feel as if at any moment I may. I’m baffled. I’m checked.” Then he added: “I’m afraid.”

  “Of him?” asked Mrs. Doyne.

  He thought. “Well—of what I’m doing.”

  “Then what, that’s so awful, are you doing?”

  “What you proposed to me. Going into his life.”

  She showed, in her present gravity, a new alarm. “And don’t you like that?”

  “Doesn’t he? That’s the question. We lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world.”

  Poor Mrs. Doyne, as if on a menace to her hard atonement, glared at this for an instant in deeper gloom. “And why shouldn’t we?”

  “Becaus
e we don’t know. There are natures, there are lives, that shrink. He mayn’t wish it,” said Withermore. “We never asked him.”

  “How could we?”

  He was silent a little. “Well, we ask him now. That’s after all what our start has so far represented. We’ve put it to him.”

  “Then—if he has been with us—we’ve had his answer.”

  Withermore spoke now as if he knew what to believe. “He hasn’t been ‘with’ us—he has been against us.”

  “Then why did you think—”

  “What I did think at first—that what he wishes to make us feel is his sympathy? Because I was in my original simplicity mistaken. I was—I don’t know what to call it—so excited and charmed that I didn’t understand. But I understand at last. He only wanted to communicate. He strains forward out of his darkness, he reaches toward us out of his mystery, he makes us dim signs out of his horror.”

  “‘Horror’?” Mrs. Doyne gasped with her fan up to her mouth.

  “At what we’re doing.” He could by this time piece it all together. “I see now that at first—”

  “Well, what?”

  “One had simply to feel he was there and therefore not indifferent. And the beauty of that misled me. But he’s there as a protest.”

  “Against my Life?” Mrs. Doyne wailed.

  “Against any Life. He’s there to save his Life. He’s there to be let alone.”

  “So you give up?” she almost shrieked.

  He could only meet her. “He’s there as a warning.”

  For a moment, on this, they looked at each other deep. “You are afraid!” she at last brought out.

  It affected him, but he insisted. “He’s there as a curse!”

  With that they parted, but only for two or three days; her last word to him continuing to sound so in his ears that, between his need really to satisfy her and another need presently to be noted, he felt he mightn’t yet take up his stake. He finally went back at his usual hour and found her in her usual place. “Yes, I am afraid,” he announced as if he had turned that well over and knew now all it meant. “But I gather you’re not.”

  She faltered, reserving her word. “What is it you fear?”

  “Well, that if I go on I shall see him.”

  “And then—?”

  “Oh then,” said George Withermore, “I should give up!”

  She weighed it with her proud but earnest air. “I think, you know, we must have a clear sign.”

  “You wish me to try again?”

  She debated. “You see what it means—for me—to give up.”

  “Ah but you needn’t,” Withermore said.

  She seemed to wonder, but in a moment went on. “It would mean that he won’t take from me—” But she dropped for despair.

  “Well, what?”

  “Anything,” said poor Mrs. Doyne.

  He faced her a moment more. “I’ve thought myself of the clear sign. I’ll try again.”

  As he was leaving her however she remembered. “I’m only afraid that to-night there’s nothing ready—no lamp and no fire.”

  “Never mind,” he said from the foot of the stairs; “I’ll find things.”

  To which she answered that the door of the room would probably at any rate be open; and retired again as to wait for him. She hadn’t long to wait; though, with her own door wide and her attention fixed, she may not have taken the time quite as it appeared to her visitor. She heard him, after an interval, on the stair, and he presently stood at her entrance, where, if he hadn’t been precipitate, but rather, for step and sound, backward and vague, he showed at least as livid and blank.

  “I give up.”

  “Then you’ve seen him?”

  “On the threshold—guarding it.”

  “Guarding it?” She glowed over her fan. “Distinct?”

  “Immense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful,” said poor George Withermore.

  She continued to wonder. “You didn’t go in?”

  The young man turned away. “He forbids!”

  “You say I needn’t,” she went on after a moment. “Well then need I?”

  “See him?” George Withermore asked.

  She waited an instant. “Give up.”

  “You must decide.” For himself he could at last but sink to the sofa with his bent face in his hands. He wasn’t quite to know afterwards how long he had sat so; it was enough that what he did next know was that he was alone among her favourite objects. Just as he gained his feet however, with this sense and that of the door standing open to the hall, he found himself afresh confronted, in the light, the warmth, the rosy space, with her big black perfumed presence. He saw at a glance, as she offered him a huger bleaker stare over the mask of her fan, that she had been above; and so it was that they for the last time faced together their strange question. “You’ve seen him?” Withermore asked.

  He was to infer later on from the extraordinary way she closed her eyes and, as if to steady herself, held them tight and long, in silence, that beside the unutterable vision of Ashton Doyne’s wife his own might rank as an escape. He knew before she spoke that all was over. “I give up.”

  H. P. LOVECRAFT

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he remained for most of his life. Plagued by illness, Lovecraft led a sheltered life in youth; his upbringing was conducted by his overly protective mother, his aunts, and—following the death of his father from syphilis in 1898—by his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, a successful business-man. Lovecraft’s formal education was spotty, and poor health compelled his departure from high school in 1908 without a diploma. After a period of reclusiveness, he joined the amateur journalism movement, prolifically writing essays, poems, and a few stories during the period 1914-1924. The founding of the pulp magazine Weird Tales allowed him to sell his early horror tales with regularity, and he became a fixture in the magazine. After a failed marriage and a move to Brooklyn (1924-26), Lovecraft returned to Providence and began his most vigorous period of fiction writing, with such works as “The Colour out of Space” (1927), “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), At the Mountains of Madness (1931), and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934-35). In these works, Lovecraft fashioned a pseudomythology that August Derleth later coined the “Cthulhu Mythos,” which postulates the existence of immense, godlike forces who have come to earth from the depths of space; this mythology embodies Lovecraft’s strongly atheistic stance, in which humanity is a helpless pawn amid the infinite depths of the universe. The Cthulhu Mythos has been widely imitated by other writers, although many (including Derleth) misunderstood its philosophical substance. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937. Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the publishing firm of Arkham House to issue Lovecraft’s works in book form, and he has since become recognized as the leading American writer of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century.

  “The Call of Cthulhu,” written in 1926 and published in Weird Tales (February 1928), is the first major tale of the Cthulhu Mythos and features Lovecraft’s use of the documentary style and his dense, richly evocative prose style.

  THE CALL OF CTHULHU

  (Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

  “Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”

  —Algernon Blackwood

  I

  THE HORROR IN CLAY

  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its o
wn direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

  Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

  My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.