by the letters “ Cthulhu” and “ R ’lyeh.”
On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to
appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been
stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home
of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the
night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had
manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness
and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and
from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling
often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he
learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently,
was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered
now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only
a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched
wildly on a gigantic thing “ miles high” which walked or
lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object,
but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, con
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vinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was
invariably a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to
suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had
happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22nd.
Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters
in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with
his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-
thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of
thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references
to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for
thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism
then forming my philosophy can account for my continued
distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange
visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man
could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and business—New England’s traditional “ salt of the earth” —
gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered
cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear
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here and there, always between March 23d and April 2nd—
the period of young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were
little more affected, though four cases of vague description
suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one
case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers
came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had
they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their
original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked
leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That
is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant
of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from
aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April
2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre
things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the
stronger during the period of the sculptor’s delirium. Over a
fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and
half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described;
and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic
nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the
note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a
widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and
occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.
Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of
merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out
the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of
the professor’s questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction.
It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases
of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period.
Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for
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135
the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window
after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the
editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces
a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “ glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings.
American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The
west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and
a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “ Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926.
And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at
this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which
I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox
had known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.
II The Tale of Inspector Legrasse
The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream
and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject
of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it
appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the
nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which
can be rendered only as “ Cthulhu” ; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox
with queries and demands for data.
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H. P. Lovecraft
This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years
before, when the American Archaeological Society held its
annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one
of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in
all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and
problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus
of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking
middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New
Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any
local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he
was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore
the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently
very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to
determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had
the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish
for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps
south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo
meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and
infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African
voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help diem to
place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult
to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation
which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been
enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of
tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around
him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness
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137
and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at
unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish
surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to
man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight
inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It
represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with
an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a
scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and
fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which
seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy,
was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly
on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long,
curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped
the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward
the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent
forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the
backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was
unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known
type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any
other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was
a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden
or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar
to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were
equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship.
They, like the subject and material, belonged to something
frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in
which our world and our conceptions have no part.
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And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and
confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one
man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of
Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no
slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight
years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of
some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst
high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or
tomasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful
phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how.
But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this
cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the
aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor
stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous
picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell,
it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial
thing now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the
assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Le-
grasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought
the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken
down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed
an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really
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139
awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the
virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals
so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both
the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had
chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—
the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks
in the phrase as chanted aloud:
/> “P h’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R ’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. ”
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for
several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him
what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This
text, as given, ran something like this:
“In his house at R ’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. ”
And now, in response to a general and urgent demand,
Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience
with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could
see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of
the wildest dreams of mythmaker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to
possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive
but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the
grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen
upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the
malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within
the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There
were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling
chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an
automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they
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alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the
terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and
malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and
now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting
wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression
which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 17
