Vicio das Imagens

OEC

2011-07-30T12:42:00.001-07:00

One eles cyclop (as oposed to two eyed ones).

Merry Xmas

2008-12-22T06:22:00.001-08:00

teste

2006-04-24T04:29:00.000-07:00

Só pelo vício

Máscaras de Carnaval

2006-02-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

Dão trabalho, é certo, mas dá imenso gozo ver o gosto que os miúdos colocam nestas máscaras.

Feliz Ano Novo

2005-12-31T02:29:00.000-08:00

Desenhos de Peter Kuper, originalmente publicados em Mind's Eye.

Robert Williams

2005-11-21T12:50:00.000-08:00

Putting the Genie Back in the Botlle

The Appetite That Dare Not Be Appeased

The Four Seasons As Seen Trough The Eyes Of Jessica’s Sock Monkey

The Myth Of The Proletariat King

A Life Of Delusion

A Perplexity Searching For An Enigma Trough The Maze Of An Ambiguity

Variações Zombie

2005-11-05T02:24:00.000-08:00

... sobre uma fotografia da catarina furtado. Tudo graças aos tutoriais do Tutorial Outpost

O meu nome

2005-11-05T02:15:00.000-08:00

Trabalhos de alunos do 5º ano de escolaridade no Photoshop.

The Great God Pan

2005-10-25T04:43:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT GOD PAN

by

ARTHUR MACHEN

I

THE EXPERIMENT

"I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. I was not sure you could spare the time."

"I was able to make arrangements for a few days; things are not very lively just now. But have you no misgivings, Raymond? Is it absolutely safe?"

The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr. Raymond's house. The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone with a dull red
glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring
call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a
faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned sharply to his friend.

"Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it."

"And there is no danger at any other stage?"

"None; absolutely no physical danger whatsoever, I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself to
transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path.
Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for what we shall do tonight."

"I should like to believe it is all true." Clarke knit his brows, and looked doubtfully at Dr. Raymond. "Are you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your theory is not a
phantasmagoria--a splendid vision, certainly, but a mere vision after all?"

Dr. Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as he answered Clarke and
faced him, there was a flush on his cheek.

"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the
meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things -- yes, from that
star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet--I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real
world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a career,'beyond them all as
beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before
another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense;
it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan."

Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.

"It is wonderful indeed," he said. "We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?"

"Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all;
a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred. I don't want
to bother you with 'shop,'Clarke; I might give you a mass of technical detail which would sound very imposing, and would leave you as enlightened as you are now. But I suppose you have read, casually, in
out-of-the-way corners of your paper, that immense strides have been made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a paragraph the other day about Digby's theory, and Browne Faber's discoveries.
Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I have not been standing still for the last fifteen years. It will be enough if I say that five years ago I
made the discovery that I alluded to when I said that ten years ago I reached the goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointments and
sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my
soul, and I knew the long journey was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred
times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a
Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think this all high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. And yet; I do not know
whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and lonely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the
speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have
merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men flash forth to the sun and
beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought. As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I have done; you can
understand now a little of what I felt as I stood here one evening; it was a summer evening, and the valley looked much as it does now; I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that
yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown
shore, and the abyss was spanned. You may look in Browne Faber's book, if you like, and you will find that to the present day men of science are unable to account for the presence, or to specify the functions
of a certain group of nerve-cells in the brain. That group is, as it were, land to let, a mere waste place for fanciful theories. I am not in the position of Browne Faber and the specialists, I am perfectly instructed
as to the possible functions of those nerve-centers in the scheme of things. With a touch I can bring them into play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the current, with a touch I can complete the
communication between this world of sense and--we shall be able to finish the sentence later on. Yes, the knife is necessary; but think what that knife will effect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense, and
probably, for the first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke, Mary will see the god Pan!"

"But you remember what you wrote to me? I thought it would be requisite that she--"

He whispered the rest into the doctor's ear.

"Not at all, not at all. That is nonsense. I assure you. Indeed, it is better as it is; I am quite certain of that."

"Consider the matter well, Raymond. It's a great responsibility. Something might go wrong; you would be a miserable man for the rest of your days."

"No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit. Come, it's getting
late; we had better go in."

Dr. Raymond led the way into the house, through the hall, and down a long dark passage. He took a key from his pocket and opened a heavy door, and motioned Clarke into his laboratory. It had once been a
billiard-room, and was lighted by a glass dome in the centre of the ceiling, whence there still shone a sad grey light on the figure of the doctor as he lit a lamp with a heavy shade and placed it on a table in the
middle of the room.

Clarke looked about him. Scarcely a foot of wall remained bare; there were shelves all around laden with bottles and phials of all shapes and colours, and at one end stood a little Chippendale book-case.
Raymond pointed to this.

"You see that parchment Oswald Crollius? He was one of the first to show me the way, though I don't think he ever found it himself. That is a strange saying of his: 'In every grain of wheat there lies hidden
the soul of a star.'"

There was not much furniture in the laboratory. The table in the centre, a stone slab with a drain in one corner, the two armchairs on which Raymond and Clarke were sitting; that was all, except an odd-looking
chair at the furthest end of the room. Clarke looked at it, and raised his eyebrows.

"Yes, that is the chair," said Raymond. "We may as well place it in position." He got up and wheeled the chair to the light, and began raising and lowering it, letting down the seat, setting the back at various
angles, and adjusting the foot-rest. It looked comfortable enough, and Clarke passed his hand over the soft green velvet, as the doctor manipulated the levers.

"Now, Clarke, make yourself quite comfortable. I have a couple hours' work before me; I was obliged to leave certain matters to the last."

Raymond went to the stone slab, and Clarke watched him drearily as he bent over a row of phials and lit the flame under the crucible. The doctor had a small hand-lamp, shaded as the larger one, on a ledge
above his apparatus, and Clarke, who sat in the shadows, looked down at the great shadowy room, wondering at the bizarre effects of brilliant light and undefined darkness contrasting with one another.
Soon he became conscious of an odd odour, at first the merest suggestion of odour, in the room, and as it grew more decided he felt surprised that he was not reminded of the chemist's shop or the surgery.
Clarke found himself idly endeavouring to analyse the sensation, and half conscious, he began to think of a day, fifteen years ago, that he had spent roaming through the woods and meadows near his own
home. It was a burning day at the beginning of August, the heat had dimmed the outlines of all things and all distances with a faint mist, and people who observed the thermometer spoke of an abnormal
register, of a temperature that was almost tropical. Strangely that wonderful hot day of the fifties rose up again in Clarke's imagination; the sense of dazzling all-pervading sunlight seemed to blot out the
shadows and the lights of the laboratory, and he felt again the heated air beating in gusts about his face, saw the shimmer rising from the turf, and heard the myriad murmur of the summer.

"I hope the smell doesn't annoy you, Clarke; there's nothing unwholesome about it. It may make you a bit sleepy, that's all."

Clarke heard the words quite distinctly, and knew that Raymond was speaking to him, but for the life of him he could not rouse himself from his lethargy. He could only think of the lonely walk he had taken
fifteen years ago; it was his last look at the fields and woods he had known since he was a child, and now it all stood out in brilliant light, as a picture, before him. Above all there came to his nostrils the scent
of summer, the smell of flowers mingled, and the odour of the woods, of cool shaded places, deep in the green depths, drawn forth by the sun's heat; and the scent of the good earth, lying as it were with
arms stretched forth, and smiling lips, overpowered all. His fancies made him wander, as he had wandered long ago, from the fields into the wood, tracking a little path between the shining undergrowth of
beech-trees; and the trickle of water dropping from the limestone rock sounded as a clear melody in the dream. Thoughts began to go astray and to mingle with other thoughts; the beech alley was
transformed to a path between ilex-trees, and here and there a vine climbed from bough to bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple grapes, and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild
olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was
wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a moment in time he
stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form. And in that moment, the sacrament
of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry "Let us go hence," and then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting.

When Clarke woke up with a start he saw Raymond pouring a few drops of some oily fluid into a green phial, which he stoppered tightly.

"You have been dozing," he said; "the journey must have tired you out. It is done now. I am going to fetch Mary; I shall be back in ten minutes."

Clarke lay back in his chair and wondered. It seemed as if he had but passed from one dream into another. He half expected to see the walls of the laboratory melt and disappear, and to awake in London,
shuddering at his own sleeping fancies. But at last the door opened, and the doctor returned, and behind him came a girl of about seventeen, dressed all in white. She was so beautiful that Clarke did not
wonder at what the doctor had written to him. She was blushing now over face and neck and arms, but Raymond seemed unmoved.

"Mary," he said, "the time has come. You are quite free. Are you willing to trust yourself to me entirely?"

"Yes, dear."

"Do you hear that, Clarke? You are my witness. Here is the chair, Mary. It is quite easy. Just sit in it and lean back. Are you ready?"

"Yes, dear, quite ready. Give me a kiss before you begin."

The doctor stooped and kissed her mouth, kindly enough. "Now shut your eyes," he said. The girl closed her eyelids, as if she were tired, and longed for sleep, and Raymond placed the green phial to her nostrils.
Her face grew white, whiter than her dress; she struggled faintly, and then with the feeling of submission strong within her, crossed her arms upon her breast as a little child about to say her prayers. The
bright light of the lamp fell full upon her, and Clarke watched changes fleeting over her face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float across the sun. And then she lay all white and still, and the
doctor turned up one of her eyelids. She was quite unconscious. Raymond pressed hard on one of the levers and the chair instantly sank back. Clarke saw him cutting away a circle, like a tonsure, from her hair,
and the lamp was moved nearer. Raymond took a small glittering instrument from a little case, and Clarke turned away shudderingly. When he looked again the doctor was binding up the wound he had made.

"She will awake in five minutes." Raymond was still perfectly cool. "There is nothing more to be done; we can only wait."

The minutes passed slowly; they could hear a slow, heavy, ticking. There was an old clock in the passage. Clarke felt sick and faint; his knees shook beneath him, he could hardly stand.

Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly did the colour that had vanished return to the girl's cheeks, and suddenly her eyes opened. Clarke quailed before them. They shone with
an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful
terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and Clarke rushed forward,
as she fell shrieking to the floor.

Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary's bedside. She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly.

"Yes," said the doctor, still quite cool, "it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan."

II

MR. CLARKE'S MEMOIRS

Mr. Clarke, the gentleman chosen by Dr. Raymond to witness the strange experiment of the god Pan, was a person in whose character caution and curiosity were oddly mingled; in his sober moments he
thought of the unusual and eccentric with undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his heart, there was a wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of
men. The latter tendency had prevailed when he accepted Raymond's invitation, for though his considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor's theories as the wildest nonsense, yet he secretly hugged
a belief in fantasy, and would have rejoiced to see that belief confirmed. The horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in an affair
not altogether reputable, and for many years afterwards he clung bravely to the commonplace, and rejected all occasions of occult investigation. Indeed, on some homeopathic principle, he for some time
attended the seances of distinguished mediums, hoping that the clumsy tricks of these gentlemen would make him altogether disgusted with mysticism of every kind, but the remedy, though caustic, was not
efficacious. Clarke knew that he still pined for the unseen, and little by little, the old passion began to reassert itself, as the face of Mary, shuddering and convulsed with an unknown terror, faded slowly from
his memory. Occupied all day in pursuits both serious and lucrative, the temptation to relax in the evening was too great, especially in the winter months, when the fire cast a warm glow over his snug bachelor
apartment, and a bottle of some choice claret stood ready by his elbow. His dinner digested, he would make a brief pretence of reading the evening paper, but the mere catalogue of news soon palled upon him,
and Clarke would find himself casting glances of warm desire in the direction of an old Japanese bureau, which stood at a pleasant distance from the hearth. Like a boy before a jam-closet, for a few minutes he
would hover indecisive, but lust always prevailed, and Clarke ended by drawing up his chair, lighting a candle, and sitting down before the bureau. Its pigeon-holes and drawers teemed with documents on the
most morbid subjects, and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which he had painfully entered he gems of his collection. Clarke had a fine contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story
ceased to interest him if it happened to be printed; his sole pleasure was in the reading, compiling, and rearranging what he called his "Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil," and engaged in this pursuit
the evening seemed to fly and the night appeared too short.

On one particular evening, an ugly December night, black with fog, and raw with frost, Clarke hurried over his dinner, and scarcely deigned to observe his customary ritual of taking up the paper and laying it
down again. He paced two or three times up and down the room, and opened the bureau, stood still a moment, and sat down. He leant back, absorbed in one of those dreams to which he was subject, and at
length drew out his book, and opened it at the last entry. There were three or four pages densely covered with Clarke's round, set penmanship, and at the beginning he had written in a somewhat larger hand:

Singular Narrative told me by my Friend, Dr. Phillips.
He assures me that all the facts related
therein are strictly and wholly True, but
refuses to give either the Surnames of the
Persons Concerned, or the Place where these
Extraordinary Events occurred.

Mr. Clarke began to read over the account for the tenth time, glancing now and then at the pencil notes he had made when it was told him by his friend. It was one of his humours to pride himself on a certain
literary ability; he thought well of his style, and took pains in arranging the circumstances in dramatic order. He read the following story:--

The persons concerned in this statement are Helen V., who, if she is still alive, must now be a woman of twenty-three, Rachel M., since deceased, who was a year younger than the above, and Trevor W., an
imbecile, aged eighteen. These persons were at the period of the story inhabitants of a village on the borders of Wales, a place of some importance in the time of the Roman occupation, but now a scattered
hamlet, of not more than five hundred souls. It is situated on rising ground, about six miles from the sea, and is sheltered by a large and picturesque forest.

Some eleven years ago, Helen V. came to the village under rather peculiar circumstances. It is understood that she, being an orphan, was adopted in her infancy by a distant relative, who brought her up in his
own house until she was twelve years old. Thinking, however, that it would be better for the child to have playmates of her own age, he advertised in several local papers for a good home in a comfortable
farmhouse for a girl of twelve, and this advertisement was answered by Mr. R., a well-to-do farmer in the above-mentioned village. His references proving satisfactory, the gentleman sent his adopted
daughter to Mr. R., with a letter, in which he stipulated that the girl should have a room to herself, and stated that her guardians need be at no trouble in the matter of education, as she was already sufficiently
educated for the position in life which she would occupy. In fact, Mr. R. was given to understand that the girl be allowed to find her own occupations and to spend her time almost as she liked. Mr. R. duly met
her at the nearest station, a town seven miles away from his house, and seems to have remarked nothing extraordinary about the child except that she was reticent as to her former life and her adopted father.
She was, however, of a very different type from the inhabitants of the village; her skin was a pale, clear olive, and her features were strongly marked, and of a somewhat foreign character. She appears to have
settled down easily enough into farmhouse life, and became a favourite with the children, who sometimes went with her on her rambles in the forest, for this was her amusement. Mr. R. states that he has
known her to go out by herself directly after their early breakfast, and not return till after dusk, and that, feeling uneasy at a young girl being out alone for so many hours, he communicated with her adopted
father, who replied in a brief note that Helen must do as she chose. In the winter, when the forest paths are impassable, she spent most of her time in her bedroom, where she slept alone, according to the
instructions of her relative. It was on one of these expeditions to the forest that the first of the singular incidents with which this girl is connected occurred, the date being about a year after her arrival at the
village. The preceding winter had been remarkably severe, the snow drifting to a great depth, and the frost continuing for an unexampled period, and the summer following was as noteworthy for its extreme
heat. On one of the very hottest days in this summer, Helen V. left the farmhouse for one of her long rambles in the forest, taking with her, as usual, some bread and meat for lunch. She was seen by some men
in the fields making for the old Roman Road, a green causeway which traverses the highest part of the wood, and they were astonished to observe that the girl had taken off her hat, though the heat of the
sun was already tropical. As it happened, a labourer, Joseph W. by name, was working in the forest near the Roman Road, and at twelve o'clock his little son, Trevor, brought the man his dinner of bread and
cheese. After the meal, the boy, who was about seven years old at the time, left his father at work, and, as he said, went to look for flowers in the wood, and the man, who could hear him shouting with delight
at his discoveries, felt no uneasiness. Suddenly, however, he was horrified at hearing the most dreadful screams, evidently the result of great terror, proceeding from the direction in which his son had gone,
and he hastily threw down his tools and ran to see what had happened. Tracing his path by the sound, he met the little boy, who was running headlong, and was evidently terribly frightened, and on
questioning him the man elicited that after picking a posy of flowers he felt tired, and lay down on the grass and fell asleep. He was suddenly awakened, as he stated, by a peculiar noise, a sort of singing he
called it, and on peeping through the branches he saw Helen V. playing on the grass with a "strange naked man," who he seemed unable to describe more fully. He said he felt dreadfully frightened and ran away
crying for his father. Joseph W. proceeded in the direction indicated by his son, and found Helen V. sitting on the grass in the middle of a glade or open space left by charcoal burners. He angrily charged her
with frightening his little boy, but she entirely denied the accusation and laughed at the child's story of a "strange man," to which he himself did not attach much credence. Joseph W. came to the conclusion
that the boy had woke up with a sudden fright, as children sometimes do, but Trevor persisted in his story, and continued in such evident distress that at last his father took him home, hoping that his mother
would be able to soothe him. For many weeks, however, the boy gave his parents much anxiety;
he became nervous and strange in his manner, refusing to leave the cottage by himself, and constantly alarming the household by waking in the night with cries of "The man in the wood! father! father!"

In course of time, however, the impression seemed to have worn off, and about three months later he accompanied his father to the home of a gentleman in the neighborhood, for whom Joseph W.
occasionally did work. The man was shown into the study, and the little boy was left sitting in the hall, and a few minutes later, while the gentleman was giving W. his instructions, they were both horrified by a
piercing shriek and the sound of a fall, and rushing out they found the child lying senseless on the floor, his face contorted with terror. The doctor was immediately summoned, and after some examination he
pronounced the child to be suffering form a kind of fit, apparently produced by a sudden shock. The boy was taken to one of the bedrooms, and after some time recovered consciousness, but only to pass into
a condition described by the medical man as one of violent hysteria. The doctor exhibited a strong sedative, and in the course of two hours pronounced him fit to walk home, but in passing through the hall the
paroxysms of fright returned and with additional violence. The father perceived that the child was pointing at some object, and heard the old cry, "The man in the wood," and looking in the direction indicated
saw a stone head of grotesque appearance, which had been built into the wall above one of the doors. It seems the owner of the house had recently made alterations in his premises, and on digging the
foundations for some offices, the men had found a curious head, evidently of the Roman period, which had been placed in the manner described. The head is pronounced by the most experienced archaeologists
of the district to be that of a faun or satyr. [Dr. Phillips tells me that he has seen the head in question, and assures me that he has never received such a vivid presentment of intense evil.]

From whatever cause arising, this second shock seemed too severe for the boy Trevor, and at the present date he suffers from a weakness of intellect, which gives but little promise of amending. The matter
caused a good deal of sensation at the time, and the girl Helen was closely questioned by Mr. R., but to no purpose, she steadfastly denying that she had frightened or in any way molested Trevor.

The second event with which this girl's name is connected took place about six years ago, and is of a still more extraordinary character.

At the beginning of the summer of 1882, Helen
contracted a friendship of a peculiarly intimate character with Rachel M., the daughter of a prosperous farmer in the neighbourhood. This girl, who was a year younger than Helen, was considered by most
people to be the prettier of the two, though Helen's features had to a great extent softened as she became older. The two girls, who were together on every available opportunity, presented a singular
contrast, the one with her clear, olive skin and almost Italian appearance, and the other of the proverbial red and white of our rural districts. It must be stated that the payments made to Mr. R. for the
maintenance of Helen were known in the village for their excessive liberality, and the impression was general that she would one day inherit a large sum of money from her relative. The parents of Rachel were
therefore not averse from their daughter's friendship with the girl, and even encouraged the intimacy, though they now bitterly regret having done so. Helen still retained her extraordinary fondness for the
forest, and on several occasions Rachel accompanied her, the two friends setting out early in the morning, and remaining in the wood until dusk. Once or twice after these excursions Mrs. M. thought her
daughter's manner rather peculiar; she seemed languid and dreamy, and as it has been expressed, "different from herself," but these peculiarities seem to have been thought too trifling for remark. One evening,
however, after Rachel had come home, her mother heard a noise which sounded like suppressed weeping in the girl's room, and on going in found her lying, half undressed, upon the bed, evidently in the
greatest distress. As soon as she saw her mother, she exclaimed, "Ah, mother, mother, why did you let me go to the forest with Helen?" Mrs. M. was astonished at so strange a question, and proceeded to
make inquiries. Rachel told her a wild story. She said --

Clarke closed the book with a snap, and turned his chair towards the fire. When his friend sat one evening in that very chair, and told his story, Clarke had interrupted him at a point a little subsequent to this,
had cut short his words in a paroxysm of horror. "My God!" he had exclaimed, "think, think what you are saying. It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world, where men and
women live and die, and struggle, and conquer, or maybe fail, and fall down under sorrow, and grieve and suffer strange fortunes for many a year; but not this, Phillips, not such things as this. There must be
some explanation, some way out of the terror. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare."

But Phillips had told his story to the end, concluding:

"Her flight remains a mystery to this day; she vanished in broad sunlight; they saw her walking in a meadow, and a few moments later she was not there."

Clarke tried to conceive the thing again, as he sat by the fire, and again his mind shuddered and shrank back, appalled before the sight of such awful, unspeakable elements enthroned as it were, and triumphant
in human flesh. Before him stretched the long dim vista of the green causeway in the forest, as his friend had described it; he saw the swaying leaves and the quivering shadows on the grass, he saw the
sunlight and the flowers, and far away, far in the long distance, the two figure moved toward him. One was Rachel, but the other?

Clarke had tried his best to disbelieve it all, but at the end of the account, as he had written it in his book, he had placed the inscription:

ET DIABOLUS INCARNATE EST. ET HOMO FACTUS EST.

III

THE CITY OF RESURRECTIONS

"Herbert! Good God! Is it possible?"

"Yes, my name's Herbert. I think I know your face, too, but I don't remember your name. My memory is very queer."

"Don't you recollect Villiers of Wadham?"

"So it is, so it is. I beg your pardon, Villiers, I didn't think I was begging of an old college friend. Good-night."

"My dear fellow, this haste is unnecessary. My rooms are close by, but we won't go there just yet. Suppose we walk up Shaftesbury Avenue a little way? But how in heaven's name have you come to this pass,
Herbert?"

"It's a long story, Villiers, and a strange one too, but you can hear it if you like."

"Come on, then. Take my arm, you don't seem very strong."

The ill-assorted pair moved slowly up Rupert Street;
the one in dirty, evil-looking rags, and the other attired in the regulation uniform of a man about town, trim, glossy, and eminently well-to-do. Villiers had emerged from his restaurant after an excellent dinner
of many courses, assisted by an ingratiating little flask of Chianti, and, in that frame of mind which was with him almost chronic, had delayed a moment by the door, peering round in the dimly-lighted street in
search of those mysterious incidents and persons with which the streets of London teem in every quarter and every hour. Villiers prided himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of
London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment. Thus he stood by the lamp-post surveying the passers-by with undisguised curiosity, and
with that gravity known only to the systematic diner, had just enunciated in his mind the formula: "London has been called the city of encounters; it is more than that, it is the city of Resurrections," when these
reflections were suddenly interrupted by a piteous whine at his elbow, and a deplorable appeal for alms. He looked around in some irritation, and with a sudden shock found himself confronted with the
embodied proof of his somewhat stilted fancies. There, close beside him, his face altered and disfigured by poverty and disgrace, his body barely covered by greasy ill-fitting rags, stood his old friend Charles
Herbert, who had matriculated on the same day as himself, with whom he had been merry and wise for twelve revolving terms. Different occupations and varying interests had interrupted the friendship, and it
was six years since Villiers had seen Herbert; and now he looked upon this wreck of a man with grief and dismay, mingled with a certain inquisitiveness as to what dreary chain of circumstances had dragged him
down to such a doleful pass. Villiers felt together with compassion all the relish of the amateur in mysteries, and congratulated himself on his leisurely speculations outside the restaurant.

They walked on in silence for some time, and more than one passer-by stared in astonishment at the unaccustomed spectacle of a well-dressed man with an unmistakable beggar hanging on to his arm, and,
observing this, Villiers led the way to an obscure street in Soho. Here he repeated his question.

"How on earth has it happened, Herbert? I always understood you would succeed to an excellent position in Dorsetshire. Did your father disinherit you? Surely not?"

"No, Villiers; I came into all the property at my poor father's death; he died a year after I left Oxford. He was a very good father to me, and I mourned his death sincerely enough. But you know what young men
are; a few months later I came up to town and went a good deal into society. Of course I had excellent introductions, and I managed to enjoy myself very much in a harmless sort of way. I played a little,
certainly, but never for heavy stakes, and the few bets I made on races brought me in money--only a few pounds, you know, but enough to pay for cigars and such petty pleasures. It was in my second season
that the tide turned. Of course you have heard of my marriage?"

"No, I never heard anything about it."

"Yes, I married, Villiers. I met a girl, a girl of the most wonderful and most strange beauty, at the house of some people whom I knew. I cannot tell you her age; I never knew it, but, so far as I can guess, I should
think she must have been about nineteen when I made her acquaintance. My friends had come to know her at Florence; she told them she was an orphan, the child of an English father and an Italian mother,
and she charmed them as she charmed me. The first time I saw her was at an evening party. I was standing by the door talking to a friend, when suddenly above the hum and babble of conversation I heard a
voice which seemed to thrill to my heart. She was singing an Italian song. I was introduced to her that evening, and in three months I married Helen. Villiers, that woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my
soul. The night of the wedding I found myself sitting in her bedroom in the hotel, listening to her talk. She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which
even now I would not dare whisper in the blackest night, though I stood in the midst of a wilderness. You, Villiers, you may think you know life, and London, and what goes on day and night in this dreadful
city; for all I can say you may have heard the talk of the vilest, but I tell you you can have no conception of what I know, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have imaged forth the faintest
shadow of what I have heard--and seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask whether it is possible for a man to behold
such things and live. In a year, Villiers, I was a ruined man, in body and soul--in body and soul."

"But your property, Herbert? You had land in Dorset."

"I sold it all; the fields and woods, the dear old house--everything."

"And the money?"

"She took it all from me."

"And then left you?"

"Yes; she disappeared one night. I don't know where she went, but I am sure if I saw her again it would kill me. The rest of my story is of no interest; sordid misery, that is all. You may think, Villiers, that I have
exaggerated and talked for effect; but I have not told you half. I could tell you certain things which would convince you, but you would never know a happy day again. You would pass the rest of your life, as I
pass mine, a haunted man, a man who has seen hell."

Villiers took the unfortunate man to his rooms, and gave him a meal. Herbert could eat little, and scarcely touched the glass of wine set before him. He sat moody and silent by the fire, and seemed relieved when
Villiers sent him away with a small present of money.

"By the way, Herbert," said Villiers, as they parted at the door, "what was your wife's name? You said Helen, I think? Helen what?"

"The name she passed under when I met her was Helen Vaughan, but what her real name was I can't say. I don't think she had a name. No, no, not in that sense. Only human beings have names, Villiers; I can't
say anymore. Good-bye; yes, I will not fail to call if I see any way in which you can help me. Good-night."

The man went out into the bitter night, and Villiers returned to his fireside. There was something about Herbert which shocked him inexpressibly; not his poor rags nor the marks which poverty had set upon his
face, but rather an indefinite terror which hung about him like a mist. He had acknowledged that he himself was not devoid of blame; the woman, he had avowed, had corrupted him body and soul, and Villiers
felt that this man, once his friend, had been an actor in scenes evil beyond the power of words. His story needed no confirmation: he himself was the embodied proof of it. Villiers mused curiously over the
story he had heard, and wondered whether he had heard both the first and the last of it. "No," he thought, "certainly not the last, probably only the beginning. A case like this is like a nest of Chinese boxes;
you open one after the other and find a quainter workmanship in every box. Most likely poor Herbert is merely one of the outside boxes; there are stranger ones to follow."

Villiers could not take his mind away from Herbert and his story, which seemed to grow wilder as the night wore on. The fire seemed to burn low, and the chilly air of the morning crept into the room; Villiers got
up with a glance over his shoulder, and, shivering slightly, went to bed.

A few days later he saw at his club a gentleman of his acquaintance, named Austin, who was famous for his intimate knowledge of London life, both in its tenebrous and luminous phases. Villiers, still full of his
encounter in Soho and its consequences, thought Austin might possibly be able to shed some light on Herbert's history, and so after some casual talk he suddenly put the question:

"Do you happen to know anything of a man named Herbert
-- Charles Herbert?"

Austin turned round sharply and stared at Villiers with some astonishment.

"Charles Herbert? Weren't you in town three years ago? No; then you have not heard of the Paul Street case? It caused a good deal of sensation at the time."

"What was the case?"

"Well, a gentleman, a man of very good position, was found dead, stark dead, in the area of a certain house in Paul Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Of course the police did not make the discovery; if you
happen to be sitting up all night and have a light in your window, the constable will ring the bell, but if you happen to be lying dead in somebody's area, you will be left alone. In this instance, as in many others,
the alarm was raised by some kind of vagabond; I don't mean a common tramp, or a public-house loafer, but a gentleman, whose business or pleasure, or both, made him a spectator of the London streets at
five o'clock in the morning. This individual was, as he said, 'going home,'it did not appear whence or whither, and had occasion to pass through Paul Street between four and five a.m. Something or other
caught his eye at Number 20; he said, absurdly enough, that the house had the most unpleasant physiognomy he had ever observed, but, at any rate, he glanced down the area and was a good deal astonished
to see a man lying on the stones, his limbs all huddled together, and his face turned up. Our gentleman thought his face looked peculiarly ghastly, and so set off at a run in search of the nearest policeman. The
constable was at first inclined to treat the matter lightly, suspecting common drunkenness; however, he came, and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The early bird, who had
picked up this fine worm, was sent off for a doctor, and the policeman rang and knocked at the door till a slatternly servant girl came down looking more than half asleep. The constable pointed out the
contents of the area to the maid, who screamed loudly enough to wake up the street, but she knew nothing of the man; had never seen him at the house, and so forth. Meanwhile, the original discoverer had
come back with a medical man, and the next thing was to get into the area. The gate was open, so the whole quartet stumped down the steps. The doctor hardly needed a moment's examination; he said the
poor fellow had been dead for several hours, and it was then the case began to get interesting. The dead man had not been robbed, and in one of his pockets were papers identifying him as--well, as a man of
good family and means, a favourite in society, and nobody's enemy, as far as could be known. I don't give his name, Villiers, because it has nothing to do with the story, and because it's no good raking up
these affairs about the dead when there are no relations living. The next curious point was that the medical men couldn't agree as to how he met his death. There were some slight bruises on his shoulders, but
they were so slight that it looked as if he had been pushed roughly out of the kitchen door, and not thrown over the railings from the street or even dragged down the steps. But there were positively no other
marks of violence about him, certainly none that would account for his death; and when they came to the autopsy there wasn't a trace of poison of any kind. Of course the police wanted to know all about the
people at Number 20, and here again, so I have heard from private sources, one or two other very curious points came out. It appears that the occupants of the house were a Mr. and Mrs. Charles Herbert;
he was said to be a landed proprietor, though it struck most people that Paul Street was not exactly the place to look for country gentry. As for Mrs. Herbert, nobody seemed to know who or what she was,
and, between ourselves, I fancy the divers after her history found themselves in rather strange waters. Of course they both denied knowing anything about the deceased, and in default of any evidence against
them they were discharged. But some very odd things came out about them. Though it was between five and six in the morning when the dead man was removed, a large crowd had collected, and several of
the neighbours ran to see what was going on. They were pretty free with their comments, by all accounts, and from these it appeared that Number 20 was in very bad odour in Paul Street. The detectives tried
to trace down these rumours to some solid foundation of fact, but could not get hold of anything. People shook their heads and raised their eyebrows and thought the Herberts rather 'queer,' 'would rather
not be seen going into their house,'and so on, but there was nothing tangible. The authorities were morally certain the man met his death in some way or another in the house and was thrown out by the
kitchen door, but they couldn't prove it, and the absence of any indications of violence or poisoning left them helpless. An odd case, wasn't it? But curiously enough, there's something more that I haven't told
you. I happened to know one of the doctors who was consulted as to the cause of death, and some time after the inquest I met him, and asked him about it. 'Do you really mean to tell me,' I said, 'that you were
baffled by the case, that you actually don't know what the man died of?' 'Pardon me,' he replied, 'I know perfectly well what caused death. Blank died of fright, of sheer, awful terror; I never saw features so
hideously contorted in the entire course of my practice, and I have seen the faces of a whole host of dead.' The doctor was usually a cool customer enough, and a certain vehemence in his manner struck me, but
I couldn't get anything more out of him. I suppose the Treasury didn't see their way to prosecuting the Herberts for frightening a man to death; at any rate, nothing was done, and the case dropped out of
men's minds. Do you happen to know anything of Herbert?"

"Well," replied Villiers, "he was an old college friend of mine."

"You don't say so? Have you ever seen his wife?"

"No, I haven't. I have lost sight of Herbert for many years."

"It's queer, isn't it, parting with a man at the college gate or at Paddington, seeing nothing of him for years, and then finding him pop up his head in such an odd place. But I should like to have seen Mrs.
Herbert; people said extraordinary things about her."

"What sort of things?"

"Well, I hardly know how to tell you. Everyone who saw her at the police court said she was at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on. I have spoken to a man who
saw her, and I assure you he positively shuddered as he tried to describe the woman, but he couldn't tell why. She seems to have been a sort of enigma; and I expect if that one dead man could have told tales,
he would have told some uncommonly queer ones. And there you are again in another puzzle; what could a respectable country gentleman like Mr. Blank (we'll call him that if you don't mind) want in such a very
queer house as Number 20? It's altogether a very odd case, isn't it?"

"It is indeed, Austin; an extraordinary case. I didn't think, when I asked you about my old friend, I should strike on such strange metal. Well, I must be off; good-day."

Villiers went away, thinking of his own conceit of the Chinese boxes; here was quaint workmanship indeed.

IV

THE DISCOVERY IN PAUL STREET

A few months after Villers'meeting with Herbert, Mr. Clarke was sitting, as usual, by his after-dinner hearth, resolutely guarding his fancies from wandering in the direction of the bureau. For more than a week
he had succeeded in keeping away from the "Memoirs," and he cherished hopes of a complete self-reformation; but, in spite of his endeavours, he could not hush the wonder and the strange curiosity that the
last case he had written down had excited within him. He had put the case, or rather the outline of it, conjecturally to a scientific friend, who shook his head, and thought Clarke getting queer, and on this
particular evening Clarke was making an effort to rationalize the story, when a sudden knock at the door roused him from his meditations.

"Mr. Villiers to see you sir."

"Dear me, Villiers, it is very kind of you to look me up; I have not seen you for many months; I should think nearly a year. Come in, come in. And how are you, Villiers? Want any advice about investments?"

"No, thanks, I fancy everything I have in that way is pretty safe. No, Clarke, I have really come to consult you about a rather curious matter that has been brought under my notice of late. I am afraid you will
think it all rather absurd when I tell my tale. I sometimes think so myself, and that's just what I made up my mind to come to you, as I know you're a practical man."

Mr. Villiers was ignorant of the "Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil."

"Well, Villiers, I shall be happy to give you my advice, to the best of my ability. What is the nature of the case?"

"It's an extraordinary thing altogether. You know my ways; I always keep my eyes open in the streets, and in my time I have chanced upon some queer customers, and queer cases too, but this, I think, beats all.
I was coming out of a restaurant one nasty winter night about three months ago; I had had a capital dinner and a good bottle of Chianti, and I stood for a moment on the pavement, thinking what a mystery
there is about London streets and the companies that pass along them. A bottle of red wine encourages these fancies, Clarke, and I dare say I should have thought a page of small type, but I was cut short by a
beggar who had come behind me, and was making the usual appeals. Of course I looked round, and this beggar turned out to be what was left of an old friend of mine, a man named Herbert. I asked him how he
had come to such a wretched pass, and he told me. We walked up and down one of those long and dark Soho streets, and there I listened to his story. He said he had married a beautiful girl, some years
younger than himself, and, as he put it, she had corrupted him body and soul. He wouldn't go into details; he said he dare not, that what he had seen and heard haunted him by night and day, and when I
looked in his face I knew he was speaking the truth. There was something about the man that made me shiver. I don't know why, but it was there. I gave him a little money and sent him away, and I assure you
that when he was gone I gasped for breath. His presence seemed to chill one's blood."

"Isn't this all just a little fanciful, Villiers? I suppose the poor fellow had made an imprudent marriage, and, in plain English, gone to the bad."

"Well, listen to this." Villiers told Clarke the story he had heard from Austin.

"You see," he concluded, "there can be but little doubt that this Mr. Blank, whoever he was, died of sheer terror; he saw something so awful, so terrible, that it cut short his life. And what he saw, he most
certainly saw in that house, which, somehow or other, had got a bad name in the neighbourhood. I had the curiosity to go and look at the place for myself. It's a saddening kind of street; the houses are old
enough to be mean and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far as I could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and unfurnished, and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and there the
ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest kind;
it's a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was to let, and I went to the agent's and got the key. Of course I should have heard nothing of the Herberts in that quarter, but I asked the man, fair and
square, how long they had left the house and whether there had been other tenants in the meanwhile. He looked at me queerly for a minute, and told me the Herberts had left immediately after the
unpleasantness, as he called it, and since then the house had been empty."

Mr. Villiers paused for a moment.

"I have always been rather fond of going over empty houses; there's a sort of fascination about the desolate empty rooms, with the nails sticking in the walls, and the dust thick upon the window-sills. But I
didn't enjoy going over Number 20, Paul Street. I had hardly put my foot inside the passage when I noticed a queer, heavy feeling about the air of the house. Of course all empty houses are stuffy, and so forth,
but this was something quite different; I can't describe it to you, but it seemed to stop the breath. I went into the front room and the back room, and the kitchens downstairs; they were all dirty and dusty
enough, as you would expect, but there was something strange about them all. I couldn't define it to you, I only know I felt queer. It was one of the rooms on the first floor, though, that was the worst. It was a
largish room, and once on a time the paper must have been cheerful enough, but when I saw it, paint, paper, and everything were most doleful. But the room was full of horror; I felt my teeth grinding as I put
my hand on the door, and when I went in, I thought I should have fallen fainting to the floor. However, I pulled myself together, and stood against the end wall, wondering what on earth there could be about
the room to make my limbs tremble, and my heart beat as if I were at the hour of death. In one corner there was a pile of newspapers littered on the floor, and I began looking at them; they were papers of
three or four years ago, some of them half torn, and some crumpled as if they had been used for packing. I turned the whole pile over, and amongst them I found a curious drawing; I will show it to you
presently. But I couldn't stay in the room; I felt it was overpowering me. I was thankful to come out, safe and sound, into the open air. People stared at me as I walked along the street, and one man said I was
drunk. I was staggering about from one side of the pavement to the other, and it was as much as I could do to take the key back to the agent and get home. I was in bed for a week, suffering from what my
doctor called nervous shock and exhaustion. One of those days I was reading the evening paper, and happened to notice a paragraph headed: 'Starved to Death.' It was the usual style of thing; a model
lodging-house in Marlyebone, a door locked for several days, and a dead man in his chair when they broke in. 'The deceased,'said the paragraph, 'was known as Charles Herbert, and is believed to have been
once a prosperous country gentleman. His name was familiar to the public three years ago in connection with the mysterious death in Paul Street, Tottenham Court Road, the deceased being the tenant of the
house Number 20, in the area of which a gentleman of good position was found dead under circumstances not devoid of suspicion.' A tragic ending, wasn't it? But after all, if what he told me were true, which I
am sure it was, the man's life was all a tragedy, and a tragedy of a stranger sort than they put on the boards."

"And that is the story, is it?" said Clarke musingly.

"Yes, that is the story."

"Well, really, Villiers, I scarcely know what to say about it. There are, no doubt, circumstances in the case which seem peculiar, the finding of the dead man in the area of Herbert's house, for instance, and the
extraordinary opinion of the physician as to the cause of death; but, after all, it is conceivable that the facts may be explained in a straightforward manner. As to your own sensations, when you went to see the
house, I would suggest that they were due to a vivid imagination; you must have been brooding, in a semi-conscious way, over what you had heard. I don't exactly see what more can be said or done in the
matter; you evidently think there is a mystery of some kind, but Herbert is dead; where then do you propose to look?"

"I propose to look for the woman; the woman whom he married. She is the mystery."

The two men sat silent by the fireside; Clarke secretly congratulating himself on having successfully kept up the character of advocate of the commonplace, and Villiers wrapped in his gloomy fancies.

"I think I will have a cigarette," he said at last, and put his hand in his pocket to feel for the cigarette-case.

"Ah!" he said, starting slightly, "I forgot I had something to show you. You remember my saying that I had found a rather curious sketch amongst the pile of old newspapers at the house in Paul Street? Here it
is."

Villiers drew out a small thin parcel from his pocket. It was covered with brown paper, and secured with string, and the knots were troublesome. In spite of himself Clarke felt inquisitive; he bent forward on his
chair as Villiers painfully undid the string, and unfolded the outer covering. Inside was a second wrapping of tissue, and Villiers took it off and handed the small piece of paper to Clarke without a word.

There was dead silence in the room for five minutes or more; the two man sat so still that they could hear the ticking of the tall old-fashioned clock that stood outside in the hall, and in the mind of one of them
the slow monotony of sound woke up a far, far memory. He was looking intently at the small pen-and-ink sketch of the woman's head; it had evidently been drawn with great care, and by a true artist, for the
woman's soul looked out of the eyes, and the lips were parted with a strange smile. Clarke gazed still at the face; it brought to his memory one summer evening, long ago; he saw again the long lovely valley, the
river winding between the hills, the meadows and the cornfields, the dull red sun, and the cold white mist rising from the water. He heard a voice speaking to him across the waves of many years, and saying
"Clarke, Mary will see the god Pan!" and then he was standing in the grim room beside the doctor, listening to the heavy ticking of the clock, waiting and watching, watching the figure lying on the green char
beneath the lamplight. Mary rose up, and he looked into her eyes, and his heart grew cold within him.

"Who is this woman?" he said at last. His voice was dry and hoarse.

"That is the woman who Herbert married."

Clarke looked again at the sketch; it was not Mary after all. There certainly was Mary's face, but there was something else, something he had not seen on Mary's features when the white-clad girl entered the
laboratory with the doctor, nor at her terrible awakening, nor when she lay grinning on the bed. Whatever it was, the glance that came from those eyes, the smile on the full lips, or the expression of the whole
face, Clarke shuddered before it at his inmost soul, and thought, unconsciously, of Dr. Phillip's words, "the most vivid presentment of evil I have ever seen." He turned the paper over mechanically in his hand
and glanced at the back.

"Good God! Clarke, what is the matter? You are as white as death."

Villiers had started wildly from his chair, as Clarke fell back with a groan, and let the paper drop from his hands.

"I don't feel very well, Villiers, I am subject to these attacks. Pour me out a little wine; thanks, that will do. I shall feel better in a few minutes."

Villiers picked up the fallen sketch and turned it over as Clarke had done.

"You saw that?" he said. "That's how I identified it as being a portrait of Herbert's wife, or I should say his widow. How do you feel now?"

"Better, thanks, it was only a passing faintness. I don't think I quite catch your meaning. What did you say enabled you to identify the picture?"

"This word--'Helen'--was written on the back. Didn't I tell you her name was Helen? Yes; Helen Vaughan."

Clarke groaned; there could be no shadow of doubt.

"Now, don't you agree with me," said Villiers, "that in the story I have told you to-night, and in the part this woman plays in it, there are some very strange points?"

"Yes, Villiers," Clarke muttered, "it is a strange story indeed; a strange story indeed. You must give me time to think it over; I may be able to help you or I may not. Must you be going now? Well, good-night,
Villiers, good-night. Come and see me in the course of a week."

V

THE LETTER OF ADVICE

"Do you know, Austin," said Villiers, as the two friends were pacing sedately along Piccadilly one pleasant morning in May, "do you know I am convinced that what you told me about Paul Street and the
Herberts is a mere episode in an extraordinary history? I may as well confess to you that when I asked you about Herbert a few months ago I had just seen him."

"You had seen him? Where?"

"He begged of me in the street one night. He was in the most pitiable plight, but I recognized the man, and I got him to tell me his history, or at least the outline of it. In brief, it amounted to this--he had been
ruined by his wife."

"In what manner?"

"He would not tell me; he would only say that she had destroyed him, body and soul. The man is dead now.

"And what has become of his wife?"

"Ah, that's what I should like to know, and I mean to find her sooner or later. I know a man named Clarke, a dry fellow, in fact a man of business, but shrewd enough. You understand my meaning; not shrewd
in the mere business sense of the word, but a man who really knows something about men and life. Well, I laid the case before him, and he was evidently impressed. He said it needed consideration, and asked
me to come again in the course of a week. A few days later I received this extraordinary letter."

Austin took the envelope, drew out the letter, and read it curiously. It ran as follows:--

"MY DEAR VILLIERS,--I have thought over the matter on which you consulted me the other night, and my advice to you is this. Throw the portrait into the fire, blot out the story from your mind. Never give
it another thought, Villiers, or you will be sorry. You will think, no doubt, that I am in possession of some secret information, and to a certain extent that is the case. But I only know a little; I am like a traveller
who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror. What I know is strange enough and horrible enough, but beyond my knowledge there are depths and horrors more frightful still, more incredible
than any tale told of winter nights about the fire. I have resolved, and nothing shall shake that resolve, to explore no whit farther, and if you value your happiness you will make the same determination.

"Come and see me by all means; but we will talk on more cheerful topics than this."

Austin folded the letter methodically, and returned it to Villiers.

"It is certainly an extraordinary letter," he said, "what does he mean by the portrait?"

"Ah! I forgot to tell you I have been to Paul Street and have made a discovery."

Villiers told his story as he had told it to Clarke, and Austin listened in silence. He seemed puzzled.

"How very curious that you should experience such an unpleasant sensation in that room!" he said at length. "I hardly gather that it was a mere matter of the imagination; a feeling of repulsion, in short."

"No, it was more physical than mental. It was as if I were inhaling at every breath some deadly fume, which seemed to penetrate to every nerve and bone and sinew of my body. I felt racked from head to foot,
my eyes began to grow dim; it was like the entrance of death."

"Yes, yes, very strange certainly. You see, your friend confesses that there is some very black story connected with this woman. Did you notice any particular emotion in him when you were telling your tale?"

"Yes, I did. He became very faint, but he assured me that it was a mere passing attack to which he was subject."

"Did you believe him?"

"I did at the time, but I don't now. He heard what I had to say with a good deal of indifference, till I showed him the portrait. It was then that he was seized with the attack of which I spoke. He looked ghastly,
I assure you."

"Then he must have seen the woman before. But there might be another explanation; it might have been the name, and not the face, which was familiar to him. What do you think?"

"I couldn't say. To the best of my belief it was after turning the portrait in his hands that he nearly dropped from the chair. The name, you know, was written on the back."

"Quite so. After all, it is impossible to come to any resolution in a case like this. I hate melodrama, and nothing strikes me as more commonplace and tedious than the ordinary ghost story of commerce; but really,
Villiers, it looks as if there were something very queer at the bottom of all this."

The two men had, without noticing it, turned up Ashley Street, leading northward from Piccadilly. It was a long street, and rather a gloomy one, but here and there a brighter taste had illuminated the dark
houses with flowers, and gay curtains, and a cheerful paint on the doors. Villiers glanced up as Austin stopped speaking, and looked at one of these houses; geraniums, red and white, drooped from every sill,
and daffodil-coloured curtains were draped back from each window.

"It looks cheerful, doesn't it?" he said.

"Yes, and the inside is still more cheery. One of the pleasantest houses of the season, so I have heard. I haven't been there myself, but I've met several men who have, and they tell me it's uncommonly jovial."

"Whose house is it?"

"A Mrs. Beaumont's."

"And who is she?"

"I couldn't tell you. I have heard she comes from South America, but after all, who she is is of little consequence. She is a very wealthy woman, there's no doubt of that, and some of the best people have taken
her up. I hear she has some wonderful claret, really marvellous wine, which must have cost a fabulous sum. Lord Argentine was telling me about it; he was there last Sunday evening. He assures me he has never
tasted such a wine, and Argentine, as you know, is an expert. By the way, that reminds me, she must be an oddish sort of woman, this Mrs. Beaumont. Argentine asked her how old the wine was, and what do
you think she said? 'About a thousand years, I believe.' Lord Argentine thought she was chaffing him, you know, but when he laughed she said she was speaking quite seriously and offered to show him the jar.
Of course, he couldn't say anything more after that; but it seems rather antiquated for a beverage, doesn't it? Why, here we are at my rooms. Come in, won't you?"

"Thanks, I think I will. I haven't seen the curiosity-shop for a while."

It was a room furnished richly, yet oddly, where every jar and bookcase and table, and every rug and jar and ornament seemed to be a thing apart, preserving each its own individuality.

"Anything fresh lately?" said Villiers after a while.

"No; I think not; you saw those queer jugs, didn't you? I thought so. I don't think I have come across anything for the last few weeks."

Austin glanced around the room from cupboard to cupboard, from shelf to shelf, in search of some new oddity. His eyes fell at last on an odd chest, pleasantly and quaintly carved, which stood in a dark corner
of the room.

"Ah," he said, "I was forgetting, I have got something to show you." Austin unlocked the chest, drew out a thick quarto volume, laid it on the table, and resumed the cigar he had put down.

"Did you know Arthur Meyrick the painter, Villiers?"

"A little; I met him two or three times at the house of a friend of mine. What has become of him? I haven't heard his name mentioned for some time."

"He's dead."

"You don't say so! Quite young, wasn't he?"

"Yes; only thirty when he died."

"What did he die of?"

"I don't know. He was an intimate friend of mine, and a thoroughly good fellow. He used to come here and talk to me for hours, and he was one of the best talkers I have met. He could even talk about painting,
and that's more than can be said of most painters. About eighteen months ago he was feeling rather overworked, and partly at my suggestion he went off on a sort of roving expedition, with no very definite
end or aim about it. I believe New York was to be his first port, but I never heard from him. Three months ago I got this book, with a very civil letter from an English doctor practising at Buenos Ayres, stating
that he had attended the late Mr. Meyrick during his illness, and that the deceased had expressed an earnest wish that the enclosed packet should be sent to me after his death. That was all."

"And haven't you written for further particulars?"

"I have been thinking of doing so. You would advise me to write to the doctor?"

"Certainly. And what about the book?"

"It was sealed up when I got it. I don't think the doctor had seen it."

"It is something very rare? Meyrick was a collector, perhaps?"

"No, I think not, hardly a collector. Now, what do you think of these Ainu jugs?"

"They are peculiar, but I like them. But aren't you going to show me poor Meyrick's legacy?"

"Yes, yes, to be sure. The fact is, it's rather a peculiar sort of thing, and I haven't shown it to any one. I wouldn't say anything about it if I were you. There it is."

Villiers took the book, and opened it at haphazard.

"It isn't a printed volume, then?" he said.

"No. It is a collection of drawings in black and white by my poor friend Meyrick."

Villiers turned to the first page, it was blank; the second bore a brief inscription, which he read:

Silet per diem universus, nec sine horrore secretus est; lucet nocturnis ignibus, chorus Aegipanum undique personatur: audiuntur et cantus tibiarum, et tinnitus cymbalorum per oram maritimam.

On the third page was a design which made Villiers start and look up at Austin; he was gazing abstractedly out of the window. Villiers turned page after page, absorbed, in spite of himself, in the frightful
Walpurgis Night of evil, strange monstrous evil, that the dead artist had set forth in hard black and white. The figures of Fauns and Satyrs and Aegipans danced before his eyes, the darkness of the thicket, the
dance on the mountain-top, the scenes by lonely shores, in green vineyards, by rocks and desert places, passed before him: a world before which the human soul seemed to shrink back and shudder. Villiers
whirled over the remaining pages; he had seen enough, but the picture on the last leaf caught his eye, as he almost closed the book.

"Austin!"

"Well, what is it?"

"Do you know who that is?"

It was a woman's face, alone on the white page.

"Know who it is? No, of course not."

"I do."

"Who is it?"

"It is Mrs. Herbert."

"Are you sure?"

"I am perfectly sure of it. Poor Meyrick! He is one more chapter in her history."

"But what do you think of the designs?"

"They are frightful. Lock the book up again, Austin. If I were you I would burn it; it must be a terrible companion even though it be in a chest."

"Yes, they are singular drawings. But I wonder what connection there could be between Meyrick and Mrs. Herbert, or what link between her and these designs?"

"Ah, who can say? It is possible that the matter may end here, and we shall never know, but in my own opinion this Helen Vaughan, or Mrs. Herbert, is only the beginning. She will come back to London,
Austin; depend on it, she will come back, and we shall hear more about her then. I doubt it will be very pleasant news."

VI

THE SUICIDES

Lord Argentine was a great favourite in London Society. At twenty he had been a poor man, decked with the surname of an illustrious family, but forced to earn a livelihood as best he could, and the most
speculative of money-lenders would not have entrusted him with fifty pounds on the chance of his ever changing his name for a title, and his poverty for a great fortune. His father had been near enough to
the fountain of good things to secure one of the family livings, but the son, even if he had taken orders, would scarcely have obtained so much as this, and moreover felt no vocation for the ecclesiastical
estate. Thus he fronted the world with no better armour than the bachelor's gown and the wits of a younger son's grandson, with which equipment he contrived in some way to make a very tolerable fight of
it. At twenty-five Mr. Charles Aubernon saw himself still a man of struggles and of warfare with the world, but out of the seven who stood before him and the high places of his family three only remained.
These three, however, were "good lives," but yet not proof against the Zulu assegais and typhoid fever, and so one morning Aubernon woke up and found himself Lord Argentine, a man of thirty who had
faced the difficulties of existence, and had conquered. The situation amused him immensely, and he resolved that riches should be as pleasant to him as poverty had always been. Argentine, after some little
consideration, came to the conclusion that dining, regarded as a fine art, was perhaps the most amusing pursuit open to fallen humanity, and thus his dinners became famous in London, and an invitation to his
table a thing covetously desired. After ten years of lordship and dinners Argentine still declined to be jaded, still persisted in enjoying life, and by a kind of infection had become recognized as the cause of joy in
others, in short, as the best of company. His sudden and tragical death therefore caused a wide and deep sensation. People could scarcely believe it, even though the newspaper was before their eyes, and the
cry of "Mysterious Death of a Nobleman" came ringing up from the street. But there stood the brief paragraph: "Lord Argentine was found dead this morning by his valet under distressing circumstances. It is
stated that there can be no doubt that his lordship committed suicide, though no motive can be assigned for the act. The deceased nobleman was widely known in society, and much liked for his genial manner
and sumptuous hospitality. He is succeeded by,"
etc., etc.

By slow degrees the details came to light, but the case still remained a mystery. The chief witness at the inquest was the deceased's valet, who said that the night before his death Lord Argentine had dined with
a lady of good position, whose named was suppressed in the newspaper reports. At about eleven o'clock Lord Argentine had returned, and informed his man that he should not require his services till the next
morning. A little later the valet had occasion to cross the hall and was somewhat astonished to see his master quietly letting himself out at the front door. He had taken off his evening clothes, and was dressed
in a Norfolk coat and knickerbockers, and wore a low brown hat. The valet had no reason to suppose that Lord Argentine had seen him, and though his master rarely kept late hours, thought little of the
occurrence till the next morning, when he knocked at the bedroom door at a quarter to nine as usual. He received no answer, and, after knocking two or three times, entered the room, and saw Lord
Argentine's body leaning forward at an angle from the bottom of the bed. He found that his master had tied a cord securely to one of the short bed-posts, and, after making a running noose and slipping it
round his neck, the unfortunate man must have resolutely fallen forward, to die by slow strangulation. He was dressed in the light suit in which the valet had seen him go out, and the doctor who was
summoned pronounced that life had been extinct for more than four hours. All papers, letters, and so forth seemed in perfect order, and nothing was discovered which pointed in the most remote way to any
scandal either great or small. Here the evidence ended; nothing more could be discovered. Several persons had been present at the dinner-party at which Lord Augustine had assisted, and to all these he
seemed in his usual genial spirits. The valet, indeed, said he thought his master appeared a little excited when he came home, but confessed that the alteration in his manner was very slight, hardly noticeable,
indeed. It seemed hopeless to seek for any clue, and the suggestion that Lord Argentine had been suddenly attacked by acute suicidal mania was generally accepted.

It was otherwise, however, when within three weeks, three more gentlemen, one of them a nobleman, and the two others men of good position and ample means, perished miserably in the almost precisely the
same manner. Lord Swanleigh was found one morning in his dressing-room, hanging from a peg affixed to the wall, and Mr. Collier-Stuart and Mr. Herries had chosen to die as Lord Argentine. There was no
explanation in either case; a few bald facts; a living man in the evening, and a body with a black swollen face in the morning. The police had been forced to confess themselves powerless to arrest or to explain
the sordid murders of Whitechapel; but before the horrible suicides of Piccadilly and Mayfair they were dumbfoundered, for not even the mere ferocity which did duty as an explanation of the crimes of the East
End, could be of service in the West. Each of these men who had resolved to die a tortured shameful death was rich, prosperous, and to all appearances in love with the world, and not the acutest research
should ferret out any shadow of a lurking motive in either case. There was a horror in the air, and men looked at one another's faces when they met, each wondering whether the other was to be the victim of
the fifth nameless tragedy. Journalists sought in vain for their scrapbooks for materials whereof to concoct reminiscent articles; and the morning paper was unfolded in many a house with a feeling of awe; no
man knew when or where the next blow would light.

A short while after the last of these terrible events, Austin came to see Mr. Villiers. He was curious to know whether Villiers had succeeded in discovering any fresh traces of Mrs. Herbert, either through Clarke
or by other sources, and he asked the question soon after he had sat down.

"No," said Villiers, "I wrote to Clarke, but he remains obdurate, and I have tried other channels, but without any result. I can't find out what became of Helen Vaughan after she left Paul Street, but I think she
must have gone abroad. But to tell the truth, Austin, I haven't paid much attention to the matter for the last few weeks; I knew poor Herries intimately, and his terrible death has been a great shock to me, a
great shock."

"I can well believe it," answered Austin gravely, "you know Argentine was a friend of mine. If I remember rightly, we were speaking of him that day you came to my rooms."

"Yes; it was in connection with that house in Ashley Street, Mrs. Beaumont's house. You said something about Argentine's dining there."

"Quite so. Of course you know it was there Argentine dined the night before--before his death."

"No, I had not heard that."

"Oh, yes; the name was kept out of the papers to spare Mrs. Beaumont. Argentine was a great favourite of hers, and it is said she was in a terrible state for sometime after."

A curious look came over Villiers' face; he seemed undecided whether to speak or not. Austin began again.

"I never experienced such a feeling of horror as when I read the account of Argentine's death. I didn't understand it at the time, and I don't now. I knew him well, and it completely passes my understanding for
what possible cause he

-- or any of the others for the matter of that--could have resolved in cold blood to die in such an awful manner. You know how men babble away each other's characters in London, you may be sure any
buried scandal or hidden skeleton would have been brought to light in such a case as this; but nothing of the sort has taken place. As for the theory of mania, that is very well, of course, for the coroner's jury,
but everybody knows that it's all nonsense. Suicidal mania is not small-pox."

Austin relapsed into gloomy silence. Villiers sat silent, also, watching his friend. The expression of indecision still fleeted across his face; he seemed as if weighing his thoughts in the balance, and the
considerations he was resolving left him still silent. Austin tried to shake off the remembrance of tragedies as hopeless and perplexed as the labyrinth of Daedalus, and began to talk in an indifferent voice of the
more pleasant incidents and adventures of the season.

"That Mrs. Beaumont," he said, "of whom we were speaking, is a great success; she has taken London almost by storm. I met her the other night at Fulham's; she is really a remarkable woman."

"You have met Mrs. Beaumont?"

"Yes; she had quite a court around her. She would be called very handsome, I suppose, and yet there is something about her face which I didn't like. The features are exquisite, but the expression is strange. And
all the time I was looking at her, and afterwards, when I was going home, I had a curious feeling that very expression was in some way or another familiar to me."

"You must have seen her in the Row."

"No, I am sure I never set eyes on the woman before; it is that which makes it puzzling. And to the best of my belief I have never seen anyone like her; what I felt was a kind of dim far-off memory, vague but
persistent. The only sensation I can compare it to, is that odd feeling one sometimes has in a dream, when fantastic cities and wondrous lands and phantom personages appear familiar and accustomed."

Villiers nodded and glanced aimlessly round the room, possibly in search of something on which to turn the conversation. His eyes fell on an old chest somewhat like that in which the artist's strange legacy lay
hid beneath a Gothic scutcheon.

"Have you written to the doctor about poor Meyrick?" he asked.

"Yes; I wrote asking for full particulars as to his illness and death. I don't expect to have an answer for another three weeks or a month. I thought I might as well inquire whether Meyrick knew an
Englishwoman named Herbert, and if so, whether the doctor could give me any information about her. But it's very possible that Meyrick fell in with her at New York, or Mexico, or San Francisco; I have no
idea as to the extent or direction of his travels."

"Yes, and it's very possible that the woman may have more than one name."

"Exactly. I wish I had thought of asking you to lend me the portrait of her which you possess. I might have enclosed it in my letter to Dr. Matthews."

"So you might; that never occurred to me. We might send it now. Hark! what are those boys calling?"

While the two men had been talking together a confused noise of shouting had been gradually growing louder. The noise rose from the eastward and swelled down Piccadilly, drawing nearer and nearer, a very
torrent of sound; surging up streets usually quiet, and making every window a frame for a face, curious or excited. The cries and voices came echoing up the silent street where Villiers lived, growing more
distinct as they advanced, and, as Villiers spoke, an answer rang up from the pavement:

"The West End Horrors; Another Awful Suicide; Full Details!"

Austin rushed down the stairs and bought a paper and read out the paragraph to Villiers as the uproar in the street rose and fell. The window was open and the air seemed full of noise and terror.

"Another gentleman has fallen a victim to the terrible epidemic of suicide which for the last month has prevailed in the West End. Mr. Sidney Crashaw, of Stoke House, Fulham, and King's Pomeroy, Devon,
was found, after a prolonged search, hanging dead from the branch of a tree in his garden at one o'clock today. The deceased gentleman dined last night at the Carlton Club and seemed in his usual health and
spirits. He left the club at about ten o'clock, and was seen walking leisurely up St. James's Street a little later. Subsequent to this his movements cannot be traced. On the discovery of the body medical aid was
at once summoned, but life had evidently been long extinct. So far as is known, Mr. Crashaw had no trouble or anxiety of any kind. This painful suicide, it will be remembered, is the fifth of the kind in the last
month. The authorities at Scotland Yard are unable to suggest any explanation of these terrible occurrences."

Austin put down the paper in mute horror.

"I shall leave London to-morrow," he said, "it is a city of nightmares. How awful this is, Villiers!"

Mr. Villiers was sitting by the window quietly looking out into the street. He had listened to the newspaper report attentively, and the hint of indecision was no longer on his face.

"Wait a moment, Austin," he replied, "I have made up my mind to mention a little matter that occurred last night. It stated, I think, that Crashaw was last seen alive in St. James's Street shortly after ten?"

"Yes, I think so. I will look again. Yes, you are quite right."

"Quite so. Well, I am in a position to contradict that statement at all events. Crashaw was seen after that;
considerably later indeed."

"How do you know?"

"Because I happened to see Crashaw myself at about two o'clock this morning."

"You saw Crashaw? You, Villiers?"

"Yes, I saw him quite distinctly; indeed, there were but a few feet between us."

"Where, in Heaven's name, did you see him?"

"Not far from here. I saw him in Ashley Street. He was just leaving a house."

"Did you notice what house it was?"

"Yes. It was Mrs. Beaumont's."

"Villiers! Think what you are saying; there must be some mistake. How could Crashaw be in Mrs. Beaumont's house at two o'clock in the morning? Surely, surely, you must have been dreaming, Villiers; you were
always rather fanciful."

"No; I was wide awake enough. Even if I had been dreaming as you say, what I saw would have roused me effectually."

"What you saw? What did you see? Was there anything strange about Crashaw? But I can't believe it; it is impossible."

"Well, if you like I will tell you what I saw, or if you please, what I think I saw, and you can judge for yourself."

"Very good, Villiers."

The noise and clamour of the street had died away, though now and then the sound of shouting still came from the distance, and the dull, leaden silence seemed like the quiet after an earthquake or a storm.
Villiers turned from the window and began speaking.

"I was at a house near Regent's Park last night, and when I came away the fancy took me to walk home instead of taking a hansom. It was a clear pleasant night enough, and after a few minutes I had the
streets pretty much to myself. It's a curious thing, Austin, to be alone in London at night, the gas-lamps stretching away in perspective, and the dead silence, and then perhaps the rush and clatter of a hansom
on the stones, and the fire starting up under the horse's hoofs. I walked along pretty briskly, for I was feeling a little tired of being out in the night, and as the clocks were striking two I turned down Ashley
Street, which, you know, is on my way. It was quieter than ever there, and the lamps were fewer;
altogether, it looked as dark and gloomy as a forest in winter. I had done about half the length of the street when I heard a door closed very softly, and naturally I looked up to see who was abroad like myself at
such an hour. As it happens, there is a street lamp close to the house in question, and I saw a man standing on the step. He had just shut the door and his face was towards me, and I recognized Crashaw
directly. I never knew him to speak to, but I had often seen him, and I am positive that I was not mistaken in my man. I looked into his face for a moment, and then--I will confess the truth--I set off at a good
run, and kept it up till I was within my own door."

"Why?"

"Why? Because it made my blood run cold to see that man's face. I could never have supposed that such an infernal medley of passions could have glared out of any human eyes; I almost fainted as I looked. I
knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man's outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to
shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair. I am sure that he did not see me; he saw nothing that you or I can see, but what he saw I hope we never shall. I do not
know when he died; I suppose in an hour, or perhaps two, but when I passed down Ashley Street and heard the closing door, that man no longer belonged to this world; it was a devil's face I looked upon."

There was an interval of silence in the room when Villiers ceased speaking. The light was failing, and all the tumult of an hour ago was quite hushed. Austin had bent his head at the close of the story, and his
hand covered his eyes.

"What can it mean?" he said at length.

"Who knows, Austin, who knows? It's a black business, but I think we had better keep it to ourselves, for the present at any rate. I will see if I cannot learn anything about that house through private channels
of information, and if I do light upon anything I will let you know."

VII

THE ENCOUNTER IN SOHO

Three weeks later Austin received a note from Villiers, asking him to call either that afternoon or the next. He chose the nearer date, and found Villiers sitting as usual by the window, apparently lost in
meditation on the drowsy traffic of the street. There was a bamboo table by his side, a fantastic thing, enriched with gilding and queer painted scenes, and on it lay a little pile of papers arranged and docketed
as neatly as anything in Mr. Clarke's office.

"Well, Villiers, have you made any discoveries in the last three weeks?"

"I think so; I have here one or two memoranda which struck me as singular, and there is a statement to which I shall call your attention."

"And these documents relate to Mrs. Beaumont? It was really Crashaw whom you saw that night standing on the doorstep of the house in Ashley Street?"

"As to that matter my belief remains unchanged, but neither my inquiries nor their results have any special relation to Crashaw. But my investigations have had a strange issue. I have found out who Mrs.
Beaumont is!"

"Who is she? In what way do you mean?"

"I mean that you and I know her better under another name."

"What name is that?"

"Herbert."

"Herbert!" Austin repeated the word, dazed with astonishment.

"Yes, Mrs. Herbert of Paul Street, Helen Vaughan of earlier adventures unknown to me. You had reason to recognize the expression of her face; when you go home look at the face in Meyrick's book of
horrors, and you will know the sources of your recollection."

"And you have proof of this?"

"Yes, the best of proof; I have seen Mrs. Beaumont, or shall we say Mrs. Herbert?"

"Where did you see her?"

"Hardly in a place where you would expect to see a lady who lives in Ashley Street, Piccadilly. I saw her entering a house in one of the meanest and most disreputable streets in Soho. In fact, I had made an
appointment, though not with her, and she was precise to both time and place."

"All this seems very wonderful, but I cannot call it incredible. You must remember, Villiers, that I have seen this woman, in the ordinary adventure of London society, talking and laughing, and sipping her coffee
in a commonplace drawing-room with commonplace people. But you know what you are saying."

"I do; I have not allowed myself to be led by surmises or fancies. It was with no thought of finding Helen Vaughan that I searched for Mrs. Beaumont in the dark waters of the life of London, but such has been
the issue."

"You must have been in strange places, Villiers."

"Yes, I have been in very strange places. It would have been useless, you know, to go to Ashley Street, and ask Mrs. Beaumont to give me a short sketch of her previous history. No; assuming, as I had to
assume, that her record was not of the cleanest, it would be pretty certain that at some previous time she must have moved in circles not quite so refined as her present ones. If you see mud at the top of a
stream, you may be sure that it was once at the bottom. I went to the bottom. I have always been fond of diving into Queer Street for my amusement, and I found my knowledge of that locality and its
inhabitants very useful. It is, perhaps, needless to say that my friends had never heard the name of Beaumont, and as I had never seen the lady, and was quite unable to describe her, I had to set to work in an
indirect way. The people there know me; I have been able to do some of them a service now and again, so they made no difficulty about giving their information; they were aware I had no communication direct
or indirect with Scotland Yard. I had to cast out a good many lines, though, before I got what I wanted, and when I landed the fish I did not for a moment suppose it was my fish. But I listened to what I was
told out of a constitutional liking for useless information, and I found myself in possession of a very curious story, though, as I imagined, not the story I was looking for. It was to this effect. Some five or six
years ago, a woman named Raymond suddenly made her appearance in the neighbourhood to which I am referring. She was described to me as being quite young, probably not more than seventeen or
eighteen, very handsome, and looking as if she came from the country. I should be wrong in saying that she found her level in going to this particular quarter, or associating with these people, for from what I
was told, I should think the worst den in London far too good for her. The person from whom I got my information, as you may suppose, no great Puritan, shuddered and grew sick in telling me of the nameless
infamies which were laid to her charge. After living there for a year, or perhaps a little more, she disappeared as suddenly as she came, and they saw nothing of her till about the time of the Paul Street case. At
first she came to her old haunts only occasionally, then more frequently, and finally took up her abode there as before, and remained for six or eight months. It's of no use my going into details as to the life
that woman led; if you want particulars you can look at Meyrick's legacy. Those designs were not drawn from his imagination. She again disappeared, and the people of the place saw nothing of her till a few
months ago. My informant told me that she had taken some rooms in a house which he pointed out, and these rooms she was in the habit of visiting two or three times a week and always at ten in the morning.
I was led to expect that one of these visits would be paid on a certain day about a week ago, and I accordingly managed to be on the look-out in company with my cicerone at a quarter to ten, and the hour and
the lady came with equal punctuality. My friend and I were standing under an archway, a little way back from the street, but she saw us, and gave me a glance that I shall be long in forgetting. That look was
quite enough for me;
I knew Miss Raymond to be Mrs. Herbert; as for Mrs. Beaumont she had quite gone out of my head. She went into the house, and I watched it till four o'clock, when she came out, and then I followed her. It
was a long chase, and I had to be very careful to keep a long way in the background, and yet not lose sight of the woman. She took me down to the Strand, and then to Westminster, and then up St. James's
Street, and along Piccadilly. I felt queerish when I saw her turn up Ashley Street; the thought that Mrs. Herbert was Mrs. Beaumont came into my mind, but it seemed too impossible to be true. I waited at the
corner, keeping my eye on her all the time, and I took particular care to note the house at which she stopped. It was the house with the gay curtains, the home of flowers, the house out of which Crashaw came
the night he hanged himself in his garden. I was just going away with my discovery, when I saw an empty carriage come round and draw up in front of the house, and I came to the conclusion that Mrs. Herbert
was going out for a drive, and I was right. There, as it happened, I met a man I know, and we stood talking together a little distance from the carriage-way, to which I had my back. We had not been there for
ten minutes when my friend took off his hat, and I glanced round and saw the lady I had been following all day. 'Who is that?' I said, and his answer was 'Mrs. Beaumont; lives in Ashley Street.' Of course there
could be no doubt after that. I don't know whether she saw me, but I don't think she did. I went home at once, and, on consideration, I thought that I had a sufficiently good case with which to go to Clarke."

"Why to Clarke?"

"Because I am sure that Clarke is in possession of facts about this woman, facts of which I know nothing."

"Well, what then?"

Mr. Villiers leaned back in his chair and looked reflectively at Austin for a moment before he answered:

"My idea was that Clarke and I should call on Mrs. Beaumont."

"You would never go into such a house as that? No, no, Villiers, you cannot do it. Besides, consider; what result..."

"I will tell you soon. But I was going to say that my information does not end here; it has been completed in an extraordinary manner.

"Look at this neat little packet of manuscript; it is paginated, you see, and I have indulged in the civil coquetry of a ribbon of red tape. It has almost a legal air, hasn't it? Run your eye over it, Austin. It is an
account of the entertainment Mrs. Beaumont provided for her choicer guests. The man who wrote this escaped with his life, but I do not think he will live many years. The doctors tell him he must have
sustained some severe shock to the nerves."

Austin took the manuscript, but never read it. Opening the neat pages at haphazard his eye was caught by a word and a phrase that followed it; and, sick at heart, with white lips and a cold sweat pouring like
water from his temples, he flung the paper down.

"Take it away, Villiers, never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform,
bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again."

"Very good. I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive
gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite
symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things;
forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a
veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life,
manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and
boil beneath such a burden?"

Villiers was pacing up and down the room, and the beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Austin sat silent for a while, but Villiers saw him make a sign upon his breast.

"I say again, Villiers, you will surely never enter such a house as that? You would never pass out alive."

"Yes, Austin, I shall go out alive--I, and Clarke with me."

What do you mean? You cannot, you would not dare..."

"Wait a moment. The air was very pleasant and fresh this morning; there was a breeze blowing, even through this dull street, and I thought I would take a walk. Piccadilly stretched before me a clear, bright
vista, and the sun flashed on the carriages and on the quivering leaves in the park. It was a joyous morning, and men and women looked at the sky and smiled as they went about their work or their pleasure,
and the wind blew as blithely as upon the meadows and the scented gorse. But somehow or other I got out of the bustle and the gaiety, and found myself walking slowly along a quiet, dull street, where there
seemed to be no sunshine and no air, and where the few foot-passengers loitered as they walked, and hung indecisively about corners and archways. I walked along, hardly knowing where I was going or what
I did there, but feeling impelled, as one sometimes is, to explore still further, with a vague idea of reaching some unknown goal. Thus I forged up the street, noting the small traffic of the milk-shop, and
wondering at the incongruous medley of penny pipes, black tobacco, sweets, newspapers, and comic songs which here and there jostled one another in the short compass of a single window. I think it was a
cold shudder that suddenly passed through me that first told me that I had found what I wanted. I looked up from the pavement and stopped before a dusty shop, above which the lettering had faded, where
the red bricks of two hundred years ago had grimed to black; where the windows had gathered to themselves the dust of winters innumerable. I saw what I required; but I think it was five minutes before I had
steadied myself and could walk in and ask for it in a cool voice and with a calm face. I think there must even then have been a tremor in my words, for the old man who came out of the back parlour, and fumbled
slowly amongst his goods, looked oddly at me as he tied the parcel. I paid what he asked, and stood leaning by the counter, with a strange reluctance to take up my goods and go. I asked about the business,
and learnt that trade was bad and the profits cut down sadly; but then the street was not what it was before traffic had been diverted, but that was done forty years ago, 'just before my father died,' he said. I
got away at last, and walked along sharply; it was a dismal street indeed, and I was glad to return to the bustle and the noise. Would you like to see my purchase?"

Austin said nothing, but nodded his head slightly; he still looked white and sick. Villiers pulled out a drawer in the bamboo table, and showed Austin a long coil of cord, hard and new; and at one end was a
running noose.

"It is the best hempen cord," said Villiers, "just as it used to be made for the old trade, the man told me. Not an inch of jute from end to end."

Austin set his teeth hard, and stared at Villiers, growing whiter as he looked.

"You would not do it," he murmured at last. "You would not have blood on your hands. My God!" he exclaimed, with sudden vehemence, "you cannot mean this, Villiers, that you will make yourself a hangman?"

"No. I shall offer a choice, and leave Helen Vaughan alone with this cord in a locked room for fifteen minutes. If when we go in it is not done, I shall call the nearest policeman. That is all."

"I must go now. I cannot stay here any longer; I cannot bear this. Good-night."

"Good-night, Austin."

The door shut, but in a moment it was open again, and Austin stood, white and ghastly, in the entrance.

"I was forgetting," he said, "that I too have something to tell. I have received a letter from Dr. Harding of Buenos Ayres. He says that he attended Meyrick for three weeks before his death."

"And does he say what carried him off in the prime of life? It was not fever?"

"No, it was not fever. According to the doctor, it was an utter collapse of the whole system, probably caused by some severe shock. But he states that the patient would tell him nothing, and that he was
consequently at some disadvantage in treating the case."

"Is there anything more?"

"Yes. Dr. Harding ends his letter by saying: 'I think this is all the information I can give you about your poor friend. He had not been long in Buenos Ayres, and knew scarcely any one, with the exception of a
person who did not bear the best of characters, and has since left--a Mrs. Vaughan.'"

VIII

THE FRAGMENTS

[Amongst the papers of the well-known physician, Dr. Robert Matheson, of Ashley Street, Piccadilly, who died suddenly, of apoplectic seizure, at the beginning of 1892, a leaf of manuscript paper was found,
covered with pencil jottings. These notes were in Latin, much abbreviated, and had evidently been made in great haste. The MS. was only deciphered with difficulty, and some words have up to the present time
evaded all the efforts of the expert employed. The date, "XXV Jul. 1888," is written on the right-hand corner of the MS. The following is a translation of Dr. Matheson's manuscript.]

"Whether science would benefit by these brief notes if they could be published, I do not know, but rather doubt. But certainly I shall never take the responsibility of publishing or divulging one word of what is
here written, not only on account of my oath given freely to those two persons who were present, but also because the details are too abominable. It is probably that, upon mature consideration, and after
weighting the good and evil, I shall one day destroy this paper, or at least leave it under seal to my friend D., trusting in his discretion, to use it or to burn it, as he may think fit.

"As was befitting, I did all that my knowledge suggested to make sure that I was suffering under no delusion. At first astounded, I could hardly think, but in a minute's time I was sure that my pulse was steady
and regular, and that I was in my real and true senses. I then fixed my eyes quietly on what was before me.

"Though horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corruption choked my breath, I remained firm. I was then privileged or accursed, I dare not say which, to see that which was on the bed,
lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes. The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent
as adamant, began to melt and dissolve.

"I know that the body may be separated into its elements by external agencies, but I should have refused to believe what I saw. For here there was some internal force, of which I knew nothing, that caused
dissolution and change.

"Here too was all the work by which man had been made repeated before my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the
beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism, always remained, while the outward form
changed.

"The light within the room had turned to blackness, not the darkness of night, in which objects are seen dimly, for I could see clearly and without difficulty. But it was the negation of light; objects were
presented to my eyes, if I may say so, without any medium, in such a manner that if there had been a prism in the room I should have seen no colours represented in it.

"I watched, and at last I saw nothing but a substance as jelly. Then the ladder was ascended again... [here the MS. is illegible] ...for one instance I saw a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not
farther describe. But the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of... as a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man
nor beast, was changed into human form, there came finally death.

"I who saw all this, not without great horror and loathing of soul, here write my name, declaring all that I have set on this paper to be true.

"ROBERT MATHESON, Med. Dr."

* * *

....Such, Raymond, is the story of what I know and what I have seen. The burden of it was too heavy for me to bear alone, and yet I could tell it to none but you. Villiers, who was with me at the last, knows
nothing of that awful secret of the wood, of how what we both saw die, lay upon the smooth, sweet turf amidst the summer flowers, half in sun and half in shadow, and holding the girl Rachel's hand, called
and summoned those companions, and shaped in solid form, upon the earth we tread upon, the horror which we can but hint at, which we can only name under a figure. I would not tell Villiers of this, nor of
that resemblance, which struck me as with a blow upon my heart, when I saw the portrait, which filled the cup of terror at the end. What this can mean I dare not guess. I know that what I saw perish was not
Mary, and yet in the last agony Mary's eyes looked into mine. Whether there can be any one who can show the last link in this chain of awful mystery, I do not know, but if there be any one who can do this,
you, Raymond, are the man. And if you know the secret, it rests with you to tell it or not, as you please.

I am writing this letter to you immediately on my getting back to town. I have been in the country for the last few days; perhaps you may be able to guess in which part. While the horror and wonder of London
was at its height--for "Mrs. Beaumont," as I have told you, was well known in society--I wrote to my friend Dr. Phillips, giving some brief outline, or rather hint, of what happened, and asking him to tell me
the name of the village where the events he had related to me occurred. He gave me the name, as he said with the less hesitation, because Rachel's father and mother were dead, and the rest of the family had
gone to a relative in the State of Washington six months before. The parents, he said, had undoubtedly died of grief and horror caused by the terrible death of their daughter, and by what had gone before that
death. On the evening of the day which I received Phillips'letter I was at Caermaen, and standing beneath the mouldering Roman walls, white with the winters of seventeen hundred years, I looked over the
meadow where once had stood the older temple of the "God of the Deeps," and saw a house gleaming in the sunlight. It was the house where Helen had lived. I stayed at Caermaen for several days. The people
of the place, I found, knew little and had guessed less. Those whom I spoke to on the matter seemed surprised that an antiquarian (as I professed myself to be) should trouble about a village tragedy, of which
they gave a very commonplace version, and, as you may imagine, I told nothing of what I knew. Most of my time was spent in the great wood that rises just above the village and climbs the hillside, and goes
down to the river in the valley; such another long lovely valley, Raymond, as that on which we looked one summer night, walking to and fro before your house. For many an hour I strayed through the maze of
the forest, turning now to right and now to left, pacing slowly down long alleys of undergrowth, shadowy and chill, even under the midday sun, and halting beneath great oaks; lying on the short turf of a
clearing where the faint sweet scent of wild roses came to me on the wind and mixed with the heavy perfume of the elder, whose mingled odour is like the odour of the room of the dead, a vapour of incense
and corruption. I stood at the edges of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep
thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till yesterday that I climbed
to the summit of the hill, and stood upon the ancient Roman road that threads the highest ridge of the wood. Here they had walked, Helen and Rachel, along this quiet causeway, upon the pavement of green
turf, shut in on either side by high banks of red earth, and tall hedges of shining beech, and here I followed in their steps, looking out, now and again, through partings in the boughs, and seeing on one side
the sweep of the wood stretching far to right and left, and sinking into the broad level, and beyond, the yellow sea, and the land over the sea. On the other side was the valley and the river and hill following
hill as wave on wave, and wood and meadow, and cornfield, and white houses gleaming, and a great wall of mountain, and far blue peaks in the north. And so at least I came to the place. The track went up a
gentle slope, and widened out into an open space with a wall of thick undergrowth around it, and then, narrowing again, passed on into the distance and the faint blue mist of summer heat. And into this
pleasant summer glade Rachel passed a girl, and left it, who shall say what? I did not stay long there.

In a small town near Caermaen there is a museum, containing for the most part Roman remains which have been found in the neighbourhood at various times. On the day after my arrival in Caermaen I walked
over to the town in question, and took the opportunity of inspecting the museum. After I had seen most of the sculptured stones, the coffins, rings, coins, and fragments of tessellated pavement which the
place contains, I was shown a small square pillar of white stone, which had been recently discovered in the wood of which I have been speaking, and, as I found on inquiry, in that open space where the Roman
road broadens out. On one side of the pillar was an inscription, of which I took a note. Some of the letters have been defaced, but I do not think there can be any doubt as to those which I supply. The
inscription is as follows:

DEVOMNODENTi
FLAvIVSSENILISPOSSvit
PROPTERNVPtias
quaSVIDITSVBVMra

"To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss) Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade."

The custodian of the museum informed me that local antiquaries were much puzzled, not by the inscription, or by any difficulty in translating it, but as to the circumstance or rite to which allusion is made.

* * *

....And now, my dear Clarke, as to what you tell me about Helen Vaughan, whom you say you saw die under circumstances of the utmost and almost incredible horror. I was interested in your account, but a
good deal, nay all, of what you told me I knew already. I can understand the strange likeness you remarked in both the portrait and in the actual face; you have seen Helen's mother. You remember that still
summer night so many years ago, when I talked to you of the world beyond the shadows, and of the god Pan. You remember Mary. She was the mother of Helen Vaughan, who was born nine months after
that night.

Mary never recovered her reason. She lay, as you saw her, all the while upon her bed, and a few days after the child was born she died. I fancy that just at the last she knew me; I was standing by the bed, and
the old look came into her eyes for a second, and then she shuddered and groaned and died. It was an ill work I did that night when you were present; I broke open the door of the house of life, without
knowing or caring what might pass forth or enter in. I recollect your telling me at the time, sharply enough, and rightly too, in one sense, that I had ruined the reason of a human being by a foolish experiment,
based on an absurd theory. You did well to blame me, but my theory was not all absurdity. What I said Mary would see she saw, but I forgot that no human eyes can look on such a sight with impunity. And I
forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express. I played
with energies which I did not understand, you have seen the ending of it. Helen Vaughan did well to bind the cord about her neck and die, though the death was horrible. The blackened face, the hideous form
upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witness, surprises me but little. What you say
the doctor whom you sent for saw and shuddered at I noticed long ago; I knew what I had done the moment the child was born, and when it was scarcely five years old I surprised it, not once or twice but
several times with a playmate, you may guess of what kind. It was for me a constant, an incarnate horror, and after a few years I felt I could bear it no more, and I sent Helen Vaughan away. You know now
what frightened the boy in the wood. The rest of the strange story, and all else that you tell me, as discovered by your friend, I have contrived to learn from time to time, almost to the last chapter. And now
Helen is with her companions...

photohop mister

2005-10-13T12:24:00.000-07:00

Fungi from Yuggoth

2005-10-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

by H.P. Lovecraft

Written 1929-30

I. The Book

The place was dark and dusty and half-lost
In tangles of old alleys near the quays,
Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas,
And with queer curls of fog that west winds tossed.
Small lozenge panes, obscured by smoke and frost,
Just shewed the books, in piles like twisted trees,
Rotting from floor to roof - congeries
Of crumbling elder lore at little cost.

I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap
Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through,
Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep
Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.
Then, looking for some seller old in craft,
I could find nothing but a voice that laughed.

II. Pursuit

I held the book beneath my coat, at pains
To hide the thing from sight in such a place;
Hurrying through the ancient harbor lanes
With often-turning head and nervous pace.
Dull, furtive windows in old tottering brick
Peered at me oddly as I hastened by,
And thinking what they sheltered, I grew sick
For a redeeming glimpse of clean blue sky.

No one had seen me take the thing - but still
A blank laugh echoed in my whirling head,
And I could guess what nighted worlds of ill
Lurked in that volume I had coveted.
The way grew strange - the walls alike and madding -
And far behind me, unseen feet were padding.

III. The Key

I do not know what windings in the waste
Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,
But on my porch I trembled, white with haste
To get inside and bolt the heavy door.
I had the book that told the hidden way
Across the void and through the space-hung screens
That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,
And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.

At last the key was mine to those vague visions
Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood
Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth's precisions,
Lurking as memories of infinitude.
The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,
The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.

IV. Recognition

The day had come again, when as a child
I saw - just once - that hollow of old oaks,
Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes
The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.
It was the same - an herbage rank and wild
Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes
That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes
Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.

I saw the body spread on that dank stone,
And knew those things which feasted were not men;
I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,
But Yuggoth, past the starry voids - and then
The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,
And all too late I knew that it was I!

V. Homecoming

The daemon said that he would take me home
To the pale, shadowy land I half recalled
As a high place of stair and terrace, walled
With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,
While miles below a maze of dome on dome
And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.
Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled
On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.

All this he promised, and through sunset's gate
He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,
And red-gold thrones of gods without a name
Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.
Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:
"Here was your home," he mocked, "when you had sight!"

VI. The Lamp

We found the lamp inside those hollow cliffs
Whose chiseled sign no priest in Thebes could read,
And from whose caverns frightened hieroglyphs
Warned every living creature of earth's breed.
No more was there - just that one brazen bowl
With traces of a curious oil within;
Fretted with some obscurely patterned scroll,
And symbols hinting vaguely of strange sin.

Little the fears of forty centuries meant
To us as we bore off our slender spoil,
And when we scanned it in our darkened tent
We struck a match to test the ancient oil.
It blazed - great God!... But the vast shapes we saw
In that mad flash have seared our lives with awe.

VII. Zaman's Hill

The great hill hung close over the old town,
A precipice against the main street's end;
Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down
Upon the steeple at the highway bend.
Two hundred years the whispers had been heard
About what happened on the man-shunned slope -
Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,
Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.

One day the mail-man found no village there,
Nor were its folk or houses seen again;
People came out from Aylesbury to stare -
Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain
That he was mad for saying he had spied
The great hill's gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.

VIII. The Port

Ten miles from Arkham I had struck the trail
That rides the cliff-edge over Boynton Beach,
And hoped that just at sunset I could reach
The crest that looks on Innsmouth in the vale.
Far out at sea was a retreating sail,
White as hard years of ancient winds could bleach,
But evil with some portent beyond speech,
So that I did not wave my hand or hail.

Sails out of lnnsmouth! echoing old renown
Of long-dead times. But now a too-swift night
Is closing in, and I have reached the height
Whence I so often scan the distant town.
The spires and roofs are there - but look! The gloom
Sinks on dark lanes, as lightless as the tomb!

IX. The Courtyard

It was the city I had known before;
The ancient, leprous town where mongrel throngs
Chant to strange gods, and beat unhallowed gongs
In crypts beneath foul alleys near the shore.
The rotting, fish-eyed houses leered at me
From where they leaned, drunk and half-animate,
As edging through the filth I passed the gate
To the black courtyard where the man would be.

The dark walls closed me in, and loud I cursed
That ever I had come to such a den,
When suddenly a score of windows burst
Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:
Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead -
And not a corpse had either hands or head!

X. The Pigeon-Flyers

They took me slumming, where gaunt walls of brick
Bulge outward with a viscous stored-up evil,
And twisted faces, thronging foul and thick,
Wink messages to alien god and devil.
A million fires were blazing in the streets,
And from flat roofs a furtive few would fly
Bedraggled birds into the yawning sky
While hidden drums droned on with measured beats.

I knew those fires were brewing monstrous things,
And that those birds of space had been Outside -
I guessed to what dark planet's crypts they plied,
And what they brought from Thog beneath their wings.
The others laughed - till struck too mute to speak
By what they glimpsed in one bird's evil beak.

XI. The Well

Farmer Seth Atwood was past eighty when
He tried to sink that deep well by his door,
With only Eb to help him bore and bore.
We laughed, and hoped he'd soon be sane again.
And yet, instead, young Eb went crazy, too,
So that they shipped him to the county farm.
Seth bricked the well-mouth up as tight as glue -
Then hacked an artery in his gnarled left arm.

After the funeral we felt bound to get
Out to that well and rip the bricks away,
But all we saw were iron hand-holds set
Down a black hole deeper than we could say.
And yet we put the bricks back - for we found
The hole too deep for any line to sound.

XII. The Howler

They told me not to take the Briggs' Hill path
That used to be the highroad through to Zoar,
For Goody Watkins, hanged in seventeen-four,
Had left a certain monstrous aftermath.
Yet when I disobeyed, and had in view
The vine-hung cottage by the great rock slope,
I could not think of elms or hempen rope,
But wondered why the house still seemed so new.

Stopping a while to watch the fading day,
I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs,
When through the ivied panes one sunset ray
Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.
I glimpsed - and ran in frenzy from the place,
And from a four-pawed thing with human face.

XIII. Hesperia

The winter sunset, flaming beyond spires
And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,
Opens great gates to some forgotten year
Of elder splendours and divine desires.
Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires,
Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;
A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear
Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.

It is the land where beauty's meaning flowers;
Where every unplaced memory has a source;
Where the great river Time begins its course
Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.
Dreams bring us close - but ancient lore repeats
That human tread has never soiled these streets.

XIV. Star-Winds

It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,
Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours
Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,
But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.
The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,
And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace,
Heeding geometries of outer space,
While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.

This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon's continents,
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away!

XV. Antarktos

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
What tricky mound of Nature's build they spied;
But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!

XVI. The Window

The house was old, with tangled wings outthrown,
Of which no one could ever half keep track,
And in a small room somewhat near the back
Was an odd window sealed with ancient stone.
There, in a dream-plagued childhood, quite alone
I used to go, where night reigned vague and black;
Parting the cobwebs with a curious lack
Of fear, and with a wonder each time grown.

One later day I brought the masons there
To find what view my dim forbears had shunned,
But as they pierced the stone, a rush of air
Burst from the alien voids that yawned beyond.
They fled - but I peered through and found unrolled
All the wild worlds of which my dreams had told.

XVII. A Memory

There were great steppes, and rocky table-lands
Stretching half-limitless in starlit night,
With alien campfires shedding feeble light
On beasts with tinkling bells, in shaggy bands.
Far to the south the plain sloped low and wide
To a dark zigzag line of wall that lay
Like a huge python of some primal day
Which endless time had chilled and petrified.

I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air,
And wondered where I was and how I came,
When a cloaked form against a campfire's glare
Rose and approached, and called me by my name.
Staring at that dead face beneath the hood,
I ceased to hope - because I understood.

XVIII. The Gardens of Yin

Beyond that wall, whose ancient masonry
Reached almost to the sky in moss-thick towers,
There would be terraced gardens, rich with flowers,
And flutter of bird and butterfly and bee.
There would be walks, and bridges arching over
Warm lotos-pools reflecting temple eaves,
And cherry-trees with delicate boughs and leaves
Against a pink sky where the herons hover.

All would be there, for had not old dreams flung
Open the gate to that stone-lanterned maze
Where drowsy streams spin out their winding ways,
Trailed by green vines from bending branches hung?
I hurried - but when the wall rose, grim and great,
I found there was no longer any gate.

XIX. The Bells

Year after year I heard that faint, far ringing
Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind;
Peals from no steeple I could ever find,
But strange, as if across some great void winging.
I searched my dreams and memories for a clue,
And thought of all the chimes my visions carried;
Of quiet Innsmouth, where the white gulls tarried
Around an ancient spire that once I knew.

Always perplexed I heard those far notes falling,
Till one March night the bleak rain splashing cold
Beckoned me back through gateways of recalling
To elder towers where the mad clappers tolled.
They tolled - but from the sunless tides that pour
Through sunken valleys on the sea's dead floor.

XX. Night-Gaunts

Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
But every night I see the rubbery things,
Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings,
And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell.
They come in legions on the north wind's swell,
With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,
Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare's well.

Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But oh! If only they would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!

XXI. Nyarlathotep

And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.

XXII. Azathoth

Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
"I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master's head.

XXIII. Mirage

I do not know if ever it existed -
That lost world floating dimly on Time's stream -
And yet I see it often, violet-misted,
And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.
There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers,
Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light,
And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night.

Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled,
Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill
There was a village, ancient and white-steepled,
With evening chimes for which I listen still.
I do not know what land it is - or dare
Ask when or why I was, or will be, there.

XXIV. The Canal

Somewhere in dream there is an evil place
Where tall, deserted buildings crowd along
A deep, black, narrow channel, reeking strong
Of frightful things whence oily currents race.
Lanes with old walls half meeting overhead
Wind off to streets one may or may not know,
And feeble moonlight sheds a spectral glow
Over long rows of windows, dark and dead.

There are no footfalls, and the one soft sound
Is of the oily water as it glides
Under stone bridges, and along the sides
Of its deep flume, to some vague ocean bound.
None lives to tell when that stream washed away
Its dream-lost region from the world of clay.

XXV. St. Toad's

"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" I heard him scream
As I plunged into those mad lanes that wind
In labyrinths obscure and undefined
South of the river where old centuries dream.
He was a furtive figure, bent and ragged,
And in a flash had staggered out of sight,
So still I burrowed onward in the night
Toward where more roof-lines rose, malign and jagged.

No guide-book told of what was lurking here -
But now I heard another old man shriek:
"Beware St.Toad's cracked chimes!" And growing weak,
I paused, when a third greybeard croaked in fear:
"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" Aghast, I fled -
Till suddenly that black spire loomed ahead.

XXVI. The Familiars

John Whateley lived about a mile from town,
Up where the hills begin to huddle thick;
We never thought his wits were very quick,
Seeing the way he let his farm run down.
He used to waste his time on some queer books
He'd found around the attic of his place,
Till funny lines got creased into his face,
And folks all said they didn't like his looks.

When he began those night-howls we declared
He'd better be locked up away from harm,
So three men from the Aylesbury town farm
Went for him - but came back alone and scared.
They'd found him talking to two crouching things
That at their step flew off on great black wings.

XXVII. The Elder Pharos

From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare
Under cold stars obscure to human sight,
There shoots at dusk a single beam of light
Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.
They say (though none has been there) that it comes
Out of a pharos in a tower of stone,
Where the last Elder One lives on alone,
Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums.

The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask
Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide
A face not of this earth, though none dares ask
Just what those features are, which bulge inside.
Many, in man's first youth, sought out that glow,
But what they found, no one will ever know.

XXVIII. Expectancy

I cannot tell why some things hold for me
A sense of unplumbed marvels to befall,
Or of a rift in the horizon's wall
Opening to worlds where only gods can be.
There is a breathless, vague expectancy,
As of vast ancient pomps I half recall,
Or wild adventures, uncorporeal,
Ecstasy-fraught, and as a day-dream free.

It is in sunsets and strange city spires,
Old villages and woods and misty downs,
South winds, the sea, low hills, and lighted towns,
Old gardens, half-heard songs, and the moon's fires.
But though its lure alone makes life worth living,
None gains or guesses what it hints at giving.

XXIX. Nostalgia

Once every year, in autumn's wistful glow,
The birds fly out over an ocean waste,
Calling and chattering in a joyous haste
To reach some land their inner memories know.
Great terraced gardens where bright blossoms blow,
And lines of mangoes luscious to the taste,
And temple-groves with branches interlaced
Over cool paths - all these their vague dreams shew.

They search the sea for marks of their old shore -
For the tall city, white and turreted -
But only empty waters stretch ahead,
So that at last they turn away once more.
Yet sunken deep where alien polyps throng,
The old towers miss their lost, remembered song.

XXX. Background

I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,
And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes -
These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.

Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,
Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths
That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths
Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.
They cut the moment's thongs and leave me free
To stand alone before eternity.

XXXI. The Dweller

It had been old when Babylon was new;
None knows how long it slept beneath that mound,
Where in the end our questing shovels found
Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.
There were vast pavements and foundation-walls,
And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew
Fantastic beings of some long ago
Past anything the world of man recalls.

And then we saw those stone steps leading down
Through a choked gate of graven dolomite
To some black haven of eternal night
Where elder signs and primal secrets frown.
We cleared a path - but raced in mad retreat
When from below we heard those clumping feet.

XXXII. Alienation

His solid flesh had never been away,
For each dawn found him in his usual place,
But every night his spirit loved to race
Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.
He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,
And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,
When one still night across curved space was thrown
That beckoning piping from the voids behind.

He waked that morning as an older man,
And nothing since has looked the same to him.
Objects around float nebulous and dim -
False, phantom trifles of some vaster plan.
His folk and friends are now an alien throng
To which he struggles vainly to belong.

XXXIII. Harbour Whistles

Over old roofs and past decaying spires
The harbour whistles chant all through the night;
Throats from strange ports, and beaches far and white,
And fabulous oceans, ranged in motley choirs.
Each to the other alien and unknown,
Yet all, by some obscurely focussed force
From brooding gulfs beyond the Zodiac's course,
Fused into one mysterious cosmic drone.

Through shadowy dreams they send a marching line
Of still more shadowy shapes and hints and views;
Echoes from outer voids, and subtle clues
To things which they themselves cannot define.
And always in that chorus, faintly blent,
We catch some notes no earth-ship ever sent.

XXXIV. Recapture

The way led down a dark, half-wooded heath
Where moss-grey boulders humped above the mould,
And curious drops, disquieting and cold,
Sprayed up from unseen streams in gulfs beneath.
There was no wind, nor any trace of sound
In puzzling shrub, or alien-featured tree,
Nor any view before - till suddenly,
Straight in my path, I saw a monstrous mound.

Half to the sky those steep sides loomed upspread,
Rank-grassed, and cluttered by a crumbling flight
Of lava stairs that scaled the fear-topped height
In steps too vast for any human tread.
I shrieked - and knew what primal star and year
Had sucked me back from man's dream-transient sphere!

XXXV. Evening Star

I saw it from that hidden, silent place
Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin
At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,
Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
The evening star - but grown a thousandfold
More haunting in this hush and solitude.

It traced strange pictures on the quivering air -
Half-memories that had always filled my eyes -
Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
Of some dim life - I never could tell where.
But now I knew that through the cosmic dome
Those rays were calling from my far, lost home.

XXXVI. Continuity

There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence - more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.

It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.

The Call of Cthulhu

2005-09-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

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The Call of Cthulhu
H.P. Lovecraft
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Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when...
consciousness was manifest, 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 own 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 survival 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 1926-7
with the death of my great-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.

As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a
childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with
some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set
of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the
material which I correlated will be later published by the
American Archaeological Society, but there was one box
which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much
averse from showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I
did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the
personal ring which the professor carried always in his
pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I
did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more
closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the
queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings
and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter
years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures?
I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for
this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch
thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of
modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern
in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of
cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often
reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs
seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much
familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed
in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at
its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of
evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution
forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be
a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form
which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous
pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I
shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy,
tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with
rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole
which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure
was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural
background

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a
stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent
hand; and made no pretension to literary style. What seemed
to be the main document was headed 'CTHULHU CULT'
in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous
reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was
divided into two sections, the first of which was headed
'1925 - Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas
St., Providence, R. I.,' and the second; 'Narrative of Inspector
John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans,
La., at 1908 A. A, S. Mtg. - Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's
Acct.' The other manuscript papers were all brief notes,
some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different
persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and
magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliott's Atlantis and the Lost
Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret
societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in
such mythological and anthropological source-books as
Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in
Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of
1925.

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very
peculiar tale. It appears that on 1 March 1925, a thin, dark
young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon
Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which
was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the
name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized
him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at
the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the
Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a,
precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and
had from childhood excited attention through the strange
stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He
called himself 'psychically hypersensitive,' but the staid folk
of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely
'queer'. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped
gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a
small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence
Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had
found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript,
the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's
archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on
the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which
suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle
showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous
freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
archaeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my
uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was
of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his
whole conversation, and which I have since found highly
characteristic of him. He said, 'It is new, indeed, for I made it
last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older
than brooding Tyre or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-
girdled Babylon.'

It was then that he began that rambling tale which
suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the
fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earth-
quake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in
New England for some years; and Wilcox's imaginations had
been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an
unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks
and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and
sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the
walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below
had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation
which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he
attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble
of letters 'Cthulhu fhtagn'

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which
excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the
sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost
frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found
himself working, chilled and clad only in his nightclothes,
when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness
in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design.
Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his
visitor especially those which tried to connect the latter with
strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand
the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in
exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread
mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed
ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his
visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore
regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript
records daily calls of the young man, during which he related
startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was
always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting
monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable
save gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated
are those rendered by the letters 'Cthulhu' and 'R'lyeh.'

On 23 March 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,
convinced 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 the whole condition was otherwise such as
to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On 2 April 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 22 March.
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 here and there, always
between 23 March and 2 April - 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 cognizant of
old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from
aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From 28 February to 2 April
a large proportion of the dreams being immeasurable 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 towards the last. One case, which the
note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a
widely known architect with leanings towards 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
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 dispatch 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 towards the end of March. Voodoo orgies
multiply in Haiti, 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 22-23
March The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and
legendry and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Boonot
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 old 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 connection that it is small wonder he pursued
young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.

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 wooden
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 realize 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 unbelieveable 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 them 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 and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so
potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized
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 towards 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 show with
any known type of art belonging to civilization'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 horribly remote and distinct
from mankind as we know it; something frightfully
suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our
world and our conceptions have no part.

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 Eskimos whose religion, a
curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate
bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
other Eskimos 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
tornasuk; 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 as far as he could tell,
it was rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial
thing now lying before the meeting.

These data, received with suspense and astonishment by
the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector
Legrasse; 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 Eskimos. There then
followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment
of really 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 Eskimo 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;

'Ph'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 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 myth-maker 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 1 November 1907, there had come to 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 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
fragments 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 to cluster around the
group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms
was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling
shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted.
A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale
undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night.
Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed
squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch
towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector
Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided
into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever
trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of
traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and
untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden
lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge,
formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and
squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of
caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said
it had been there before D'lberville, before La Salle, before
the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and
birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was
to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to
keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the
merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was
bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship
had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds
and incidents.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises
heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the
black morass towards the red glare and the muffled tom-
toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal
qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one
when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and
orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to demoniac
heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and
reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential
tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less
organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a
well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong
chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.'

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees
were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself.
Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into
a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately
deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the
face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly
hypnotized with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of
perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On
this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of
human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola
could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were
braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous
ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by
occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite
monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which,
incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven
statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular
intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head
downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters
who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of
worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the
mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale
between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been
only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable
Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the
ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the
wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D.
Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the
faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes
and mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees - but
I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively
brief duration. Duty came first; and although there
must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the
throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged
determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the
resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild
blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made;
but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven
sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall
into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the
worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were
carried away on improvised stretchers by their
fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was
carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain
and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very
low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most
were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos,
largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape
Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the
heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked
it became manifest that something far deeper and older
than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant
as they were, the creatures held with suprising consistency
to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who
lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the
young world out of the sky. These Old Ones were gone
now inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead
bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man,
who formed a cult which had never died. This was that
cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and
always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark
places all over the world until the time when the great
priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of
R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth
again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the
stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be
waiting to liberate him.

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret
which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not
absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for
shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these
were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old
Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might
say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one
could read the old writing now, but things were told by word
of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret - that was
never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only
this: 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be
hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.
All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the
killing had been done by Black-winged Ones which had
come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the
haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent
account could ever be gained. What the police did extract
came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named
Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and
talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of
China.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled
the speculations of theosophists and made man and the
world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been
aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had
had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless
Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of
time before man came, but there were arts which could
revive Them when the stars had come round again to the
right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed,
come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images
with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not
composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape
for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that
shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right,
They could plunge from world to world through the sky;
but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But
although They no longer lived, They would never really
die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of
R'lyeh preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a
glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might
once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force
from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The
spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented
Them from making an initial move, and They could only
lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions
of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the
universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted
thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When,
after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old
Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their
dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the
fleshy minds of mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult
around small idols which the Great Ones showed them;
idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would
never die till the stars came right again, and the secret
priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive
His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would
be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as
the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and
evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men
shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the
liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout
and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth

would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the
memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy
of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the
entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had
happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths
and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep
waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not
even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse.
But memory never died, and high priests said that the city
would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of
the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and
full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten
sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much.
He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old
Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he
said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts
of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden
and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult,
and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book
had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen
said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of
the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might
read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered,
had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the
cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that
it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University
could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the
detective had come to the highest authorities in the
country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of
Professor Webb.

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by
Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is
echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who
attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal
publication of the society. Caution is the first care of those
accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture.
Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb,
but at the latter's death it was returned to him and
remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago.
It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the
dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I
did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon
hearing after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of
the cult, of a sensitive young man, who had dreamed not
only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-
found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come
in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the
formula uttered alike by Eskimo diabolists and mongrel
Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an
investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently
natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of
having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of
having invented a series of dreams to heighten and
continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream-
narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of
course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my
mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to
adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So,
after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and
correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes
with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to
Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I
thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and
aged man.

Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in
Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of
seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its
stuccoed front amidst the lovely Colonial houses on the
ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest
Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his
rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered
about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He
will, I believe, be heard from some time as one of the great
decadents; for he has crystallized in clay and will one day
mirror in marble those nightmares and fantasia which
Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith
makes visible in verse and in painting.

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned
languidly at my knock and asked me my business without
rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some
interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing
his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for
the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard,
but sought with some subtlety to draw him out.

In a short time I became convinced of his absolute
sincerity for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none
could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had
influenced his art profoundly, and he showed me a morbid
statue whose contours almost made me shake with the
potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having
seen the original of this thing except in his own dream
bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves in-
sensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape
he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing
of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless
catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I
strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
received the weird impressions.

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion;
making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean
city of slimy green stone - whose geometry, he oddly said, was
all wrong - and hear with frightened expectancy the
ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: 'Cthulhu
fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn.'

These words had formed part of that dread ritual which
told of dead Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at
R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs.
Wilcox, I was sure, had. heard of the cult in some casual
way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his
equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its
sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression
in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now
beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a
very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly
affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like;
but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and
his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all
the success his talent promises.

The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and
at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into
its origin and connections. I visited New Orleans, talked
with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party,
saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the
mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately,
had been dead for some years. What I now heard
so graphically at first hand, though it was really no more
than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written,
excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a
very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose
discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My
attitude was still one of absolute materialism as I wish it still
were, and I discounted with a most inexplicable perversity
the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected
by Professor Angell.

One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear
I know, is that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell
on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront
swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a
negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine
pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be
surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as
ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and
beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone;
but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead.
Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering
the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I
think Professor Angel1 died because he knew too much, or
because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go
as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

III. THE MADNESS FROM THE SEA

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total
effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye
on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on
which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of
my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian
journal, Sydney Bulletin for 18 April 1925. It had escaped
even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its
issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's
research.

I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor
Angell called the 'Cthulhu Cult,' and was visiting a
learned friend of Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a
local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one
day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught
by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath
the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for
my friend has tide affiliations in all conceivable foreign
parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous
stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had
found in the swamp.

Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I
scanned the item in detail, and was disappointed to find it
of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was
of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I
carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as
follows:

MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

Vigilant Arrives with Helpless Armed New Zealand
Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found
Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experi-
ence. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to
Follow.

The Morrison Co's freighter Vigilant, bound from
Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling
Harbour having in tow the battled and disabled but
heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin NZ, which
was sighted 12 April in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude
152° 17', with one living and one dead man aboard.

The Vigilant left Valparaiso 25 March, and on 2 April was
driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally
heavy storms and monster waves. On 12 April the derelict
was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found
upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious
condition and one man who had evidently been dead for
more than a week.

The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of
unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose
nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society,
and the Museum in College Street all profess complete
bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin
of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.

This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly
strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen,
a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate
of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed
for Callao 20 February, with a complement of eleven men.

The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south
of her course by the great storm of 1 March, and on 22
March, in S. Latitude 49º 51', W. Longitude 128º 34',
encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking
crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered
peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon
the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning
upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.

The Emma's men showed fight, says the survivor, and
though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the
waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and
board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht's
deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being
slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and
desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.

Three of Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First
Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under
Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured
yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any
reason for their ordering back had existed.

The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small
island, although none is known to exist in that part of the
ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though
Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story and
speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm.

Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht
and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm
of 2 April.

From that time till his rescue on the 12th, the man
remembers little, and he does not even recall when William
Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death reveals no
apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or
exposure.

Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well
known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation
along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of
half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the
woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great
haste just after the storm and earth tremors of 1 March.

Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew
an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober
and worthy man.

The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole
matter, beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be
made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has
done hitherto.

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image;
but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were
new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence
that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What
motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as
they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the
unknown island on which six of the Emma's crew had died,
and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What
had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what
was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most
marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage
of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable
significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted
by my uncle?

1 March - our 28 February according to the International
Date Line - the earthquake and storm had come. From
Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly
forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of
the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange,
dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in
his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. 23 March the crew
of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men
dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed
a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant
monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad
and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what
of this storm of 2 April - the date on which all dreams of the
dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the
bondage of strange fever? What of all this - and of those hints
of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their
coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams?
Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's
power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone,
for in some way the second of April had put a stop to
whatever monstrous menace had begun its seige of mankind's
soul.

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and
arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San
Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin: where,
however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-
members who had lingered in the old sea taverns.
Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention;
though there was vague talk about one inland trip these
mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red
flame were noted on the distant hills.

In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with
yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive
questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage
in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in
Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no
more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they
could do was to give me his Oslo address.

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with
seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw
the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, in Circular
Quay at Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its
noncommittal bulk. The crouching image with its
cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and
hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at
Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a
thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the
same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly
strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse's
smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had
found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world
held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of
what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great
Ones: 'They had come from the stars, and had brought
Their images with Them.'

Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never
before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo.
Sailing for London, I re-embarked at once for the Norwegian
capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in
the shadow of the Egeberg.

Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of
King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo
during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as
'Christiania.' I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked
with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient
building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black
answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment
when she told me in halting English that Gustaf
Johansen was no more.

He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the
doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no
more than he had told the public, but had left a long
manuscript - of 'technical matters' as he said - written in
English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of
casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near
the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic
window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once
helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach
him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the
end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.

I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will
never leave me till I, too, am at rest; 'accidentally' or
otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with
her husband's 'technical matters' was sufficient to entitle me
to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to
read it on the London boat.

It was a simple, rambling thing - a naïve sailor's effort at a
postfacto diary - and strove to recall day by day that last
awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in
all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist
enough to show why the sound of the water against the
vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped
my ears with cotton.

Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though
he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly
again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind
life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed
blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea,
known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to
loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall
heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-
admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on 20
February, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born
tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the
horrors that filled men's dreams. Once more under control,
the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert
on 22 March, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of
her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on
the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some
peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their
destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous
wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against
his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry.
Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht
under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone
pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47º 9', W.
Longitude 126º 43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud,
ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing
less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror-
the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in
measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome
shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great
Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and
sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts
that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called
imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of
liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not
suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous
monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was
buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of
the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost
wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were
awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of
elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance
that it was nothing of this or any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the
dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the
stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs
with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is
poignantly visible in every line of the mate's frightened
description.

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen
achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the
city; for instead of describing any definite structure or
building, he dwells only on the broad impressions of vast
angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to
anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with
horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about
angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of
his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the
dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and
loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from
ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst
gazing at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on
this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over
titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal
staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when
viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this
sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense
lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven
rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first
showed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers
before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed
was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn
of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they
searched - vainly, as it proved - for some portable souvenir
to bear away.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot
of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest
followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved
door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was,
Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that
it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and
jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it
lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-
door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place
was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the
ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of
everything else seemed fantasmally variable.

Briden pushed at the stone in several places without
result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the
edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed
interminably along the grotesque stone moulding - that is,
one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all
horizontal - and the men wondered how any door in the
universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the
acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they
saw that it was balanced.

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or
along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone
watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven
portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion it moved
anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of
matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material.
That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it
obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been
revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its
aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it
slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping
membranous wings. The odour arising from the newly
opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-
eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound
down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening
still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly
squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black
doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of
madness.

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he
wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he
thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant.
The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for
such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such
eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic
order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder
that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor
Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The
Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had
awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and
what an age-old cult had failed to do by designs, a band of
innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of
years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for
delight.

Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before
anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the
universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera and Angstrom.
Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly
over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and
Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of
masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which
was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden
and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for
the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the
slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the
water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite
the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of
only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between
wheels and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst
the distorted horrors of the indescribable scene, she began to
chum the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that
charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the
stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the
fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied
Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and
began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic
potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing at
intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst
Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the
Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully
up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the
engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed
the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the
noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher
the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the
pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the
stern of a demon galleon. The awful squid-head with
writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy
yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.

There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy
nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand
opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put
on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid
and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a
venomous seething astern; where - God in heaven! - the
scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was
nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its
distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus
from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the
idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for
himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to
navigate after the first bold flight; for the reaction had taken
something out of his soul. Then came the storm of 2 April,
and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There
is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity,
of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail,
and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from
the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating
chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green,
bat-winged mucking imps of Tartarus.

Out of that dream came rescue - the Vigilant the vice-
admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage
back home to the old house by the Egeberg He could not tell
-they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew
before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would
be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in
the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor
Angell. With it shall go this record of mine - this test of my
own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may
never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that
the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring
and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to
me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went,
as poor Johansen went, so shall I go. I know too much, and
the cult still lives.

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of
stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His
accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over
the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still
bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in
lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking
whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now
be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end?
What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay
spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come -
but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not
survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution
before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

The Colour Out Of Space

2005-09-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

---==={{[<>][<>]}}===---
The Colour Out of Space
H. P. Lovecraft
---==={{[<>][<>]}}===---

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that
no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope
fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the
glint of sunlight. On the gender slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with
Squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in
the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys
crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath loW gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there.
French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come
and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or
handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for
imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which
keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything
he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for
years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days;
and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the
travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight
where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was
laid curing far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found
amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless
linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the
dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue
waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets
of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden
lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told
me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very
old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must he something which
grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The name "blasted heath"
seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the
folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and
slopes for myself, end ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder
mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees
grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England
wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor
was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little
hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only
6ne or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds
and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon
everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and
the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry.
I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to
sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some
forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.
But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I
came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit
such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had
coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region.- It must, I
thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever
grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky
like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the
north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I
felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my
business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on
that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever
to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks
stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled
bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning
black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with
the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed
welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of
Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the
place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that
ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the
south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the
deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what
was meant by that phrase "strange days" which so many evasively muttered. I
could not, however, get any good answers1 except that all the mystery was much
more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but
something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the
'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be
exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's
crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone
in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick.
It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal
odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent
knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door
could could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had
expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and
white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.
Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter
of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the
district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think,
and before I knew it had graNped quite as much of the subject as any man I had
talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I bad known in the sections
where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old
wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been had
not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he
showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had
roamed all his life. They were better under water now - better under water since
the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body
leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.

It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and
whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to
recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew
only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where
his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder
that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak
much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling
to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to -
Boston to give up my position. I could i!not go into that dim chaos of old
forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the
black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will
soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery
fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by
night - at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me
to drink the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been
no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods
were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the
devil held court beside a curious 'lone altar older than the Indians. These were
not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange
days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions
in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by
night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded
itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the
house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come - the trim white Nahum
Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi
Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed
very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors
from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird
visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so
large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big
brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic
well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not
shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly
in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was
oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged
rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They
took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece
refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and
seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing
smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps
they had taken less than they thought.
The day after that-all this was in June of '82-the professors had trooped out
again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer
things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it
in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the
strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that
well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when
heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving
itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of
the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the
dark its luminosity was very marked. stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon
had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the
spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal
spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical
properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when
faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water
did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia
merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had
difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as I
mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were am monia and caustic soda,
alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although
the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be
slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had
attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was
magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there
seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron.
When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in
glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the
original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were
gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf
where they had been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he
went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his
wife did not accompany him. It had now most cer tainly shrunk, and even the
sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the
dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth
had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before,
it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface
curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They
gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that
the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule
embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the
meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by
analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon
tapping it appeared to promise both brittle ness and hollowness. One of the
professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous
little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the
puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across,
and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing
substance wasted away.
Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by
drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved, however,
as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost
plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in
powerful acids, possessing an unknown spec trum, wasting away in air, and
attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no
identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college
scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of
this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside
properties and obedient to outside laws.
That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to Nahum's
the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone, magnetic as it
had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had "drawn the
lightning," as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times within an hour
the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the
storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep,
half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the
scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so
that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the
disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week,
at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone,
no residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they
had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs
outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of
matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate
sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At
least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of
local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his
wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi
exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise
for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place
had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That
July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre
pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the
shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and
he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened,
and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was
growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra
barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore
disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one
single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had
crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites
induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and
Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he
declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most
of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and
observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed
to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their
attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or
melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and
then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the
most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain
footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels,
white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not
quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but
appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits
of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without
interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his
sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit
had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either
Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up
by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered
why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it
developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and
not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions
of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while
its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before.
The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that
only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But
the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing,
and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere
else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store
at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and
had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the
road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours
that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse
had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That
afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed
that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit
of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that
there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and
remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be,
several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore
were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but
all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral
element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away.
And as for the footprints and frightened horses - of course this was mere
country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start.
There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for
superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the
strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when
given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half
later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like
one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college
spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the
abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first,
though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously
in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they
swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this.
Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family
developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they
could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments
when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments
increased week by week, till it became common speech that "something was wrong
with all Nahum's folks." When the early saxifrage came out it had another
strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related
and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and
showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than
write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were
held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city
man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in
connection with these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of
the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the
vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and
through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a
bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the
region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green
grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of
some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the' known tints of
earth. The "Dutchman's breeches" became a thing of sinister menace, and the
bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners
thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided
that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and
sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land
around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's
strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for
almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him
waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of
course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school
each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an
especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and
crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and
motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The
Gardners took to watching at night - watching in all directions at random for
something - they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that Thaddeus
had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the
window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The
boughs surely moved, and there was no 'wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had
come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who
made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not
see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night
in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short
paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included,
saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a
farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the
darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere
in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a
detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard
near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the
lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then
Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not
long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All
the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of
brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his
visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were
virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in
town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was
surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor
woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her
raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things
moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not
wholly sounds. Something was taken away - she was being drained of something -
something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be - someone must make
it keep off - nothing was ever still in the night - the walls and windows
shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about
the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her
expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and
Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her
locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours,
and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly
luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby
vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused
them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been
terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum
opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It
took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless
and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be
shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but
found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the
end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used their own
strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching.
And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers
whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out
grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and
distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such
blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The
strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their
hives and taken to the woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and
Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His
wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a
constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school
opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who
first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that
was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig
another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum,
however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to
strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted
supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and
ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the
aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if
they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain
and familiar doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a
pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and
sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving colours
down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about
it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting
himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his
mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was
very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some
terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully
imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the
brother who had been his greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry
turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome
upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo
loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless,
and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place,
and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing
grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and
muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had
never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows.
Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or
compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last
stages - and death was always the result - there would be a greying and turning
brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison,
for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of
prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can
pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease - yet what disease
could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest came
there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry were
dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished
one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time
before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no
mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.
On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous
news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in
a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot
behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been
nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact;
but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the
stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror
seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence
of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi
accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to
calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had
come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told
him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's
screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring
look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached,
Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that
spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not
have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more
imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he
been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must
inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the
screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in
the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs.
Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was
gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had
never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was
about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard
then, but before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no
glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the
time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and
the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he
had found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and
apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern;
while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to
hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs.
Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could
give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people
around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people
at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone.
Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum
would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they
survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy
what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he
knew.
For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what might
have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There
was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was
apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was shocking - greyish
withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from
archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November
sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some
subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He
was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly
conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and
as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood,
indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty,
with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney.
Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable,
and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and
the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.
Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing
Zenas. "In the well - he lives in the well - " was all that the clouded father
would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the
mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. "Nabby? Why, here she is!" was the
surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for
himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their
nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very
close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of
the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys
of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some
fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the
crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor.
The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat
to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he
did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly
he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed
the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful
current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present
horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the
geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted
in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which
confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young
Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was that it
very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the
comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which
cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly
judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room,
and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so
monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a
stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through
that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum
to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some place where he
could be cared for.
Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He even
thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy
vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What presence had
his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further
sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most
detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With
an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of
what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into
which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but stood
there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of
the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread
expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow step - and merciful
Heaven! - the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight;
steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.
Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at
once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and
buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to
guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound out
there. A sort of liquid splash - water - it must have been the well. He had left
Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked
in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient
woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the
gambrel roof no later than 1730.
A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's
grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose.
Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the
kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer
there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether
it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could
not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last
half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced.
There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could
not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a
face. "What was it, Nahum - what was it?" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging
lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
"Nothin'... nothin'... the colour... it burns... cold an' wet, but it burns...
it lived in the well... I seen it... a kind of smoke... jest like the flowers
last spring... the well shone at night... Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas...
everything alive... suckin' the life out of everything... in that stone... it
must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place... dun't know what it
wants... that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone... they
smashed it... it was the same colour... jest the same, like the flowers an'
plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds... seeds... they growed... I seen it
the fust time this week... must a' got strong on Zenas. . . he was a big boy,
full o' life... it beats down your mind an' then gets ye... burns ye up... in
the well water... you was right about that... evil water... Zenas never come
back from the well... can't git away... draws ye... ye know summ'at's comin' but
tain't no use... I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took... whar's Nabby,
Ammi?... my head's no good... dun't know how long sense I fed her... it'll git
her ef we ain't keerful... jest a colour. . . her face is gittin' to hev that
colour sometimes towards night... an' it burns an' sucks... it come from some
place whar things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said so... he
was right... look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more... sucks the life out..."
But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely
caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out
the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and
stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass that well from
which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the window, and had
seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not
dislodged anything after all - the splash had been something else - something
which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.
When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and
thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he
set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family
was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum
and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause
seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also
stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning
at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take three officers
to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical examiner, and the
veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will,
for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that
accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people with him.
The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived
at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to
gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic
and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the
farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling
objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the
medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could
be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them - and here it
develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where
the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both samples
gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the baffling bands were precisely
like those which the strange meteor had yielded in the previous year. The
property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter
consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.
Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to
do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to
be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the great
sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had feared
something down there so much so that he had never even thought of searching it
for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore
the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of
rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men
sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their noses against
the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they had feared it
would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need to speak too
exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, though
the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog
in about the same state, and a number of bones of small animals. The ooze and
slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who
descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden
shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid
obstruction.
Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it
was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went
indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light
of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men
were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common
element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of
live-stock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the
tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not
believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor
had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten
nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very
possibly. It might be a good idea to analyze it. But what peculiar madness could
have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and the
fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why
was everything so grey and brittle?
It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed
the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds
seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow
was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit
like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little
ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and
as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this
strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that
colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the
nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy
vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that
very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where
nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and
hateful current of vapour had brushed past him - and then poor Nahum had been
taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last - said it was like
the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and the
splash in the well-and now that well was belching forth to the night a pale
insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.
It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that
tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but
wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the
daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal
exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted
landscape. It wasn't right - it was against Nature - and he thought of those
terrible last words of his stricken friend, "It come from some place whar things
ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said so..."
All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road,
were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door
to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. "Dun't go out
thar," he whispered. "They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin'
lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed
from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago
June. Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light
out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it
feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it
this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from
the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way
it works ain't like no way 0' God's world. It's some'at from beyond."
So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the
hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful
moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous
sets of fragments-two from the house and two from the well-in the woodshed
behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths
in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he
himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room,
but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know
what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so far
hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not have
done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and the
special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit
sky.
All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The
others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the point
at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need for
words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, and it
is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later
on, that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to
premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not
long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the
lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the
standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the
high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching
morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the
moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some
allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and
struggling below the black roots.
Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over
the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At
this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical
from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a
fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top
height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each
bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles'
heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a
glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed
marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to
recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well
was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a
sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds
could form. It was no longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the
shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly
into the sky.
The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra
bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of
controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of
the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly frightful,
but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any
earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their
restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of
the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed to some
wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were commencing
to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far
unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and as
Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the span of frantic
greys had broken their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.
The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were
exchanged. "It spreads on everything organic that's been around here," muttered
the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave
a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. "It was
awful," he added. "There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the
feeling of something lurking under there." Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed
deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as
he mumbled his formless reflections. "It come from that stone - it growed down
thar - it got everything livin' - it fed itself on 'em, mind and body - Thad an'
Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby - Nahum was the last - they all drunk the water - it got
strong on 'em - it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be here - now
it's goin' home -"
At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and
began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator
described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no man
before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched
sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror
and nausea. Words could not convey it - when Ammi looked out again the hapless
beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of
the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. But the
present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective silently
called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the
absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to
pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the
fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned
windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf
and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it
strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave
that house.
Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the
ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look
back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for
they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough passing
the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled,
fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high
up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge
over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open meadows.
When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the
bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous
unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as
had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all
straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of
the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn
and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned
that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of
cryptic poison from the well - seething, feeling, lapping, reaching,
scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable
chromaticism.
Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a
rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and
curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No
watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of
Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted
into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by
the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and
crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the
outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up
from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural
sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending
forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic
fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours
they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they
had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared
not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in
black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed
the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling
party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to show what was left
down there at Nahum's.
Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham
by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him
inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish
to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road.
For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed
forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come.
As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their
faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of
desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that stricken,
far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon
the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was
just a colour - but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi
recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk
down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.
Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the
horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new
reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the
sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope
the water will always be very deep - but even so, I shall never drink it. I do
not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had
been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there
were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the
cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that
nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried,
and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been
living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, nor has
anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a
great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever
dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it "the blasted heath."
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college
chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well,
or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study
the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the
country notion that the blight is spreading - little by little, perhaps an inch
a year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in
the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow.
Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses
- the few that are left in this motor age - grow skittish in the silent valley;
and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.
They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the
years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then
the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to
live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one
sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of
whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very
horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm
is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of
strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods
whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about
the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When
twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity
about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know - that is all. There was no one but
Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and
all three professors who saw the aerolite and its coloured globule are dead.
There were other globules - depend upon that. One must have fed itself and
escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still
down the well - I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above
the miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps
there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchling
is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is
it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current
Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at
night.
What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi
described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of
our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes
and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies
whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to
measure. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed
realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere
existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it
throws open before our frenzied eyes.
I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale
was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible
came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible - though I
know not in what proportion - still remains. I shall be glad to see the water
come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing
- and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away?
How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's - "can't git away - draws
ye - ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use - " Ammi is such a good old man
- when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep a
sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle
monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.
---==={{[<>][<>]}}===---

Variações

2005-09-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

O que bebes, camarada?

Pesos pesados

TV Land

2005-09-07T08:35:00.000-07:00

Uma galeria com trabalhos já velhinhos, às voltas com a ideia de televisão.

The Wall

Screen

Metropolis

Long Time

Time Flow

The End

Click Me

Astronaut

Pinceladas

2005-09-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Pinceladas

Para vosso engrandecimento, e meu convencimento, uma galeria de pinturas dos tempos em que eu era um jovem artista com algum talento. Pois, agora, a juventude já se foi, o artista tornou-se professor (de criativo a crivado em poucos anos) e o talento... esse, espero ainda ter algum.

Após Matisse: Odalisca

Após Matisse: Odalisca III

Pintura

Pintura III

Após daVinci

Após daVinci II

Virgem e o menino

O Meu Quarto Onde É Tão Giro Dormir À Noite

The Corpse Bride

2005-09-05T04:18:00.000-07:00

The Corpse Bride

Once upon a time there was a young man who lived in a village in Russia. He was to be married and he and his friend prepared to go to the village where his bride-to-be lived, two days walk from his own village.

The first night the two friends decided to set up camp by a river. The young man who was going to be married spotted an unusual looking stick in the ground that looked like a bony finger. He and his friend started joking about this bony finger sticking out of the ground and the young man who was going to be married took the golden wedding ring from his pocket and put it on the strange-looking stick. And then he started to do the wedding dance around the stick; he danced around the stick with the golden wedding ring three times and he sang the Jewish wedding song, and recited the entire marriage sacrament as he danced around the stick, he and his friend laughing the whole time.

Their fun stopped suddenly when the earth started rumbling and shaking beneath their feet. The place where the stick had been opened up and a very bedraggled looking corpse emerged, a living corpse, she had been a bride, but now was barely more than a skeleton held together by shreds of skin, still wearing an old torn white silk wedding dress. Worms and spider webs hung on the once-beaded bodice and tattered veil.

The two young men were aghast.

"Ah," she said, "you have done the wedding dance and pronounced the marriage vows and you have put a ring on my finger. Now we are man and wife. I demand my rights as your bride."

Shuddering with terror at the corpse bride's words, the two young men fled to the village where the young bride was waiting to be married. They went straight to the rabbi.

"Rabbi," asked the young man breathlessly, "I have a very important question to ask you. If by some chance you're walking in the woods and you happen to see a stick that looks like a long bony finger coming out of the ground and you happen to put a golden wedding ring on the finger and do the wedding dance and pronounce the wedding vows, is this indeed a real marriage?"

Looking very puzzled, the rabbi asked, "Do you know of such a situation?"

"Oh no, no, of course not, it's just a hypothetical question."

Stroking his long beard thoughfully, the rabbi said, "let me think about it."

And just then, a big gust of wind blew the door open, and in walked the corpse bride. "I lay claim to this man as my husband, for he has placed this wedding ring on my finger and pronounced the solemn marriage vows," she demanded, her bony finger rattling as she shook it at her intended brigegroom.

"This is indeed a very serious matter. I'll have to consult with the other rabbis," said the rabbi.

Soon all the rabbis from the surrounding villages were gathered together. They went into conference, while the two young men anxiously awaited their decision.

The corpse bride waited on the porch tapping her foot, declaring, "I want to celebrate my wedding night with my husband."

These chilling words made every hair on the young man's body stand on end, though it was a warm summer day.

While the rabbis were conferring, the real human bride arrived and wanted to know what all the fuss was about. When her fiance explained just what had happened, she started weeping, "Oh, my life is ruined, all my hopes and dreams are shattered; I'll never be married, never have a family."

Just then the rabbis came out and asked: "Did you indeed put a gold ring on the finger, and did you dance around it three times and did you indeed pronounce the wedding vows in their entirety?"

The two young men who by this time were cowering in a far corner nodded their heads.

Looking very serious the rabbis went back to confer again.

And the young bride wept bitter tears, while the corpse bride was by now gloating at the prospect of her long awaited wedding night.

After a short while the rabbis solemnly marched out, took their seats, and announced, "Since you put the wedding ring on the finger of the corpse bride and you danced around it three times reciting the wedding vows, we have determined that this constitutes a proper wedding ceremony. Even so, we have decided that the dead have no claim upon the living."

Sighing and murmuring could be heard from all corners, the young bride was especially relieved.

The corpse bride, however, howled, "Oh, there goes my last chance for a life; I'll never have my dreams fulfilled now, it's forever lost," and she collapsed on the floor. It was a pathetic sight, a heap of bones in a tattered wedding gown, lying there, lifeless.

Overcome with compassion for the corpse bride, the young bride knelt down and gathered up that old heap of bones, carefully arranging the shredded silk finery and holding her close, half sang, half murmured, as if cradling a crying infant, "dont worry I'll live your dreams for you, I'll live your hopes for you, I'll have your children for you, I'll have enough children for the two of us and you can rest in peace knowing that our children and our children's children will be well cared for and will not forget us."

Tenderly she closed the eyes of the corpse bride, tenderly she held her in her arms and slowly and with measured steps she marched down to the river with her fragile charge, took her down by the river where she dug a shallow grave for her and laid her in it and crossed the bony arms over the bony chest, the one hand clasping the one with the ring on it, and folded the wedding gown around her.

Then she whispered, "May you rest in peace, I will live your dreams for you, don't worry, we will not forget you."

The corpse bride looked happy and at peace in her new grave, as if she somehow knew that she would be fulfilled through this young bride And the young bride covered up, slowly, the corpse bride, covered up the tattered wedding gown in the shallow grave, covered it all up with earth, then put wildflowers all over the grave and stones all around it.

Then the young bride went back to her fiance and they were married in a very solemn wedding ceremony and they lived many happy years together. And all their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren were always told the story of the corpse bride, and so she was not forgotten, nor was the wisdom and compassion she had taught them forgotten either.

BACKGROUND;

The Corpse Bride is a story based on actual events that occurred in 19th century Russia, at a time when anti-semitism was widespread in eastern Europe. Very often bands of anti-semites would waylay a Jewish wedding party on their way to the wedding. And because the bride would be the one to bear future generations, she would be ripped out of the carriage and murdered.

She would then be buried in her wedding gown.

(in The Tim Burton Collective)

Scherzos

2005-09-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Os scherzos foram uma forma de terapia para tentar recuperar a criatividade que tinha antes de uma depressão que me afectou ao ponto de eu ter quase deixado de pintar. Daí a opção pela colagem digital, pelas cores virantes e pela procura de uma noção de mundo fantástico. Trabalhos de 2000.

Besta

Domine

Orion

Red Sky

Seven Seconds

Sidri

Crepúsculo

2005-09-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

O crepúsculo é um fenómendo diário. Uma pintura todos os dias renovada de fotões em colisão com as partículas da atmosfera. O pôr-do-sol é todos os dias igual, mas todos os dias diferente. Repete-se, mas sempre que se repete uma minuta variação na atmosfera ou no clima transforma por completo o fenómeno, tornando-o sempre irremediávelmente diferente.

Atractores Estranhos

2005-09-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

O proliferar de desenhos abstractos a preto e branco já começava a cansar. Não há como uma diversidade de cores para adulterar as percepções. Não vou explicar o que significa Atractor Estranho. Tem a ver com geometria fractal. O preto de fundo ajuda a unificar as cores aparentemente aleatórias das imagens.

Atractor Estranho 1.0

Atractor Estranho 1.1

Atractor Estranho 1.2

Atractor Estranho 1.3

Atractor Estranho 1.4

Atractor Estranho 1.5

Materiais de trabalho: bloco A5 Winsor & Newton; porta-minas com mina HB; canetas rötring xonox, uniball eye, de tinta preta; scanner e photoshop com paleta de cores websafe.

Beleza Esquecida

2005-08-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Qual terá sido a primeiríssima coisa a ser fotografada aquando da invenção da máquina fotográfica, nos idos do século XIX? Sabemos que foi o alpendre da casa de Daguerre, inventor do processo de fotografia imortalizado como Daguerreotipo. Mas agora, a segunda coisa a ser fotografada...

Os nossos avós, apesar do que reza a história, não eram nada rapaziada de bons costumes. É certo que as aparências de vestidos compridos e recatados e uma moralidade pública rígida são as imagens que nos restam do século XIX. Haviam sempre as casinhas da lanterna vermelha, antros de depravação tolerados pelas mulheres bem pensantes como forma de os seus maridos exorcizarem os seus instintos mais bárbaros. Pelo menos, são essas as imagens expostas nas paredes das casas de fim de século e nas paredes dos museus. Há alguma sugestão de sexualidade, é certo, mas não passam de vislumbres de seios em quadros edificantes ou alguns castos nús.

Um vasculhar dos baús dos nossos avós do final do século XIX rápidamente revela a verdade: armados com a novíssima invenção que era a máquina fotográfica, os nossos malandrecos avós dedicaram-se a explorar as paisagens da sexualidade. Algumas das fotos não devem nada às modernas explorações dos fétiches sexuais mais bizarros que flutuam nos confundios mais tenebrosos da internet. Pessoalmente, escolhi estas fotos que estão na fronteira entre o explícito e o artístico. Não passam de fotografias de mulheres nuas; mas o que as afasta da simples pornografia é o cuidado: cuidado com a pose, o cuidado com a iluminação, o cuidado com a composição da imagem. Ao olhar para estas fotografias, os nossos depravados avós sentir-se-iam certamente mais descansados nas suas consciências dolorosas. Estavam a apreciar a beleza da arte, não simples representações de uma sexualidade nua e bárbara, a sexualidade que tanto desejavam, intimamente, mas não podiam expressar graças aos tabus contemporâneos.

Marés Baixas

2005-08-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

Maré baixa na praia do forte, o meu local preferido pelos recantos fantásticos que mar põe a descoberto.

Praia do Forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do Forte

Praia do forte

Praia do Forte

2005-08-22T12:35:00.000-07:00

Cartoon de Peter Kuper

Maré Baixa

2005-08-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Fotografias tiradas na maré baixa em várias das praias da Ericeira. As mais próximas foram tiradas na praia do forte.

Elvis Everywhere

2005-08-03T04:43:00.000-07:00

Elvis Today

Numa leitura rápida a este artigo sobre Elvis Presley, escrito por um crítico de jazz notório por detestar a música de Presley, uma curiosa observação: o rock, quando surgiu, era criticado a torto e a direito por ser uma música rebelde e imprópria, uma expressão demasiado revolucionária para a estabilidade social. Chocava pais, professores, políticos, padres, enfim, todos aqueles sectores conservadores da sociedade. Mas, apesar da mitologia do rock rebelde, quando o jazz se afirmou nos anos vinte as críticas e pressões sociais foram muito mais intensas. O factor comum? A ganância das empresas de discos, capazes de discernir que não existe má publicidade, e perfeitamente conscientes de que quanto mais chocante, mais rentável o produto. É o que se vê hoje em dia com o hip hop, som revolucionário dos bairros sociais transformado em produto revolucionário pré-embalado pelas multinacionais. Moral da história: As revoluções culturais pouco têm de revolucionário. Mal surgem, são logo monopolizadas por corporações apostadas em espremer todos os cêntimozinhos possíveis da rebeldia cultural.

Yet that was the very definition of rock ’n’ roll. What made it different from all other earlier kinds of pop was not the music itself but the marketing. Like big-band swing and Sinatra-era pop, rock was aimed at young people, but unlike other kinds of pop, it was also specifically designed to annoy their parents. Nearly every television documentary on early rock or Presley devotes too much time to inflating the reaction of the older generation. In fact, rock bashing by church and school officials was mild compared with the hostility toward jazz in the twenties. Still, parents, teachers, and clergy did condemn rock ’n’ roll, and the more they excoriated it, the more the entertainment business embraced it as a way to make money. It was characterized as subversive, the sound of rebellion, while being enthusiastically underwritten by corporate America.

Somos todos uns vendidos!

Por estas razões sou eu tão avesso a gostar das bandas da moda. Promovidas como rebeldes e independentes, na realidade são criadas e manipuladas por experientes departamentos de marketing. E o toque rebelde soa um bocadinho farsola, isto para ser simpático. Pelo menos na musica clássica, ou nas bandas mesmo independentes (aquelas com cds quase impossíveis de localizar), não há hipocrisias, e os trabalhos valem pelo seu mérito.

Desenho

2005-08-03T04:35:00.000-07:00

Novo desenho. Finalmente. Parecia-me que durante as férias não teria tempo de acabar este desenho, o que seria um contra-senso. É nas férias que se tem tempo, mas... aí reside o problema. Durante o ano de trabalho adia-se todo o ócio para as férias, para o tempo em que se tem tempo. O resultado de tantos adiamentos, de livros com leitura adiada, de passeios na praia adiados, e, confesso, de arrumações a ateliers que se assemelham a zonas de guerra é uma sobrecarga de tempo. Na verdade, nas férias não há tempo para nada. Uma tonelada de livros para ler, duas toneladas de artigos para ler, um blog a manter, desenhos para fazer (já nem me atrevo a pensar em pinturas), experiências culinárias para arriscar, horas para passar com os amigos, saltos à praias... que stress! São mais cansativas as férias do que os dias de trabalho. Mas ao menos aquela pilha interminável de livros e revistas que invadiu a minha mesa de cabeceira está a diminuir a olhos vistos. Isto o que é preciso é ritmo. Duas horinhas logo de manhã, das oito às dez, para pôr leituras em dia, dez ao meio-dia para a net, o blog e alguns retoques no photoshop, meio dia às três para almoços e rotinas, praia até ao fim da tarde (e o que seria da praia sem um bom livro e o caderno de desenhos). Noite, para os amigos e umas leiturazinhas antes de adormecer. Assim as férias rendem.

Novo desenho. Embora sejam fruto do acaso, ao chegar ao fim surpreendo-me sempre como qualquer destes desenhos conseguiu encontrar a sua lógica interna. Nunca parto com uma ideia definida, ou sequer com uma ideia. O rabisco dá o mote, e continua-se, até que de linhas isoladas nascem estas formas irreais.

Irreais, e com muito gosto. Nunca me senti atraído pelos realismos. Quando admiro alguma obra realista, admiro-a pela sua técnica, não pelo conteúdo. É como olhar para um edifício prestando apenas atenção às equações matemáticas que definem a estrutura. A realidade, mesmo nestes dias solarengos, é entediante e rotineira. As paisagens interiores reveladas pelos voos da imaginação são muito mais interessantes.

2005-08-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Null-A

2005-08-03T04:24:00.000-07:00

Scherzo IV

2005-08-03T04:21:00.000-07:00

Scherzo III

2005-08-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

scherzo II

2005-08-03T04:18:00.000-07:00

Scherzos

2005-08-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

X-40

2005-08-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

X-38

2005-08-01T04:57:00.000-07:00

X-37

2005-08-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

X-36

2005-08-01T04:49:00.000-07:00

X-35

2005-08-01T04:48:00.000-07:00

x-34

2005-08-01T04:46:00.000-07:00

X-33

2005-08-01T04:43:00.000-07:00

X-31

2005-08-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

X-29

2005-08-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

X-24 A

2005-08-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

x-24 Lifting Body

2005-08-01T04:35:00.000-07:00

x-15

2005-08-01T04:33:00.000-07:00

X-5

2005-08-01T04:32:00.000-07:00

X-Planes: X-4

2005-08-01T04:31:00.000-07:00

X Planes - X-3 Stilletto

2005-08-01T04:30:00.000-07:00

X-Planes - X-2

2005-08-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

X-Planes: X-1

2005-07-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T11:01:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:56:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:52:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em Perigo

2005-07-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Donzelas em perigo

2005-07-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - Marylin

2005-07-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - Green Coca Cola Bottles

2005-07-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - Electric Chair

2005-07-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - Disquieting Muses

2005-07-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - Golden Marilyn Monroe

2005-07-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - Campbell Soup

2005-07-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - Two Sisters

2005-07-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

Sargent Fury

2005-07-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

Chamber of Darkness

2005-07-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Astarte Syriaca

2005-07-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

Aubrey Beardsley - Horidas

2005-07-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

Henri Rousseau - Dream

2005-07-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

Puvis de Chavannes - Young Girls by the Seaside

2005-07-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

Caspar David Friedrich - Fog

2005-07-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

Helmut Newton - Greta Scacci in Hollywood

2005-07-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

Aula de pintura - portugal, s�culo XIX

2005-07-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

Yayoi Kusama - Wave

2005-07-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

Robert Rauschenberg - Red Painting

2005-07-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

R. B. Kitaj - Amerika

2005-07-03T12:58:00.000-07:00

Jeff Koons - Loopy

2005-07-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

Richard Estes - Central Savings

2005-07-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

Marina Abramovic - Cleaning the Mirror

2005-07-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

Niki de Saint-Phalle - Dream Machine

2005-07-03T12:49:00.000-07:00

Sandro Chia - Idleness of Sisyphus

2005-07-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

Silver Surfer

2005-07-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

Silver Surfer

2005-07-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

Marvel 1602