prhyme/lovecraft.txt

  The AlchemistBy H P Lovecraft High up crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my ancestors For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls These ancient turrets stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons Counts and even Kings had been defied yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the invader But since those glorious years all is changed A poverty but little above the level of dire want together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour and the falling stones of the walls the overgrown vegetation in the parks the dry and dusty moat the ill-paved courtyards and toppling towers without as well as the sagging floors the worm-eaten wainscots and the faded tapestries within all tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur As the ages passed first one then another of the four great turrets were left to ruin until at last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I Antoine last of the unhappy and accursed Comtes de C first saw the light of day ninety long years ago Within these walls and amongst the dark and shadowy forests the wild ravines and grottoes of the hillside below were spent the first years of my troubled life My parents I never knew My father had been killed at the age of thirty-two a month before I was born by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle and my mother having died at my birth my care and education devolved solely upon one remaining servitor an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence whose name I remember as Pierre I was an only child and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill At the time Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company Now I know that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line that were nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage hearths Thus isolated and thrown upon my own resources I spent the hours of my childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau and in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its foot It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and occult in Nature most strongly claimed my attention Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little yet what small knowledge of it I was able to gain seemed to depress me much Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great house yet as I grew out of childhood I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility that had a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange but which now became dimly terrible The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the Comtes of my line had met their end Whilst I had hitherto considered this but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived men I afterward pondered long upon these premature deaths and began to connect them with the wanderings of the old man who often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two years Upon my twenty-first birthday the aged Pierre gave to me a family document which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to son and continued by each possessor Its contents were of the most startling nature and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions At this time my belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated else I should have dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century when the old castle in which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress It told of a certain ancient man who had once dwelt on our estates a person of no small accomplishments though little above the rank of peasant by name Michel usually designated by the surname of Mauvais the Evil on account of his sinister reputation He had studied beyond the custom of his kind seeking such things as the Philosophers Stone or the Elixir of Eternal Life and was reputed wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy Michel Mauvais had one son named Charles a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts and who had therefore been called Le Sorcier or the Wizard This pair shunned by all honest folk were suspected of the most hideous practices Old Michel was said to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil and the unaccountable disappearances of many small peasant children were laid at the dreaded door of these two Yet through the dark natures of the father and the son ran one redeeming ray of humanity the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity whilst the youth had for his parent a more than filial affection One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the vanishment of young Godfrey son to Henri the Comte A searching party headed by the frantic father invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron Without certain cause in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair the Comte laid hands on the aged wizard and ere he released his murderous hold his victim was no more Meanwhile joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice telling too late that poor Michel had been killed in vain As the Comte and his associates turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemists the form of Charles Le Sorcier appeared through the trees The excited chatter of the menials standing about told him what had occurred yet he seemed at first unmoved at his fathers fate Then slowly advancing to meet the Comte he pronounced in dull yet terrible accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of C May neer a noble of thy murdrous lineSurvive to reach a greater age than thine spake he when suddenly leaping backwards into the black wood he drew from his tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his fathers slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night The Comte died without utterance and was buried the next day but little more than two and thirty years from the hour of his birth No trace of the assassin could be found though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighbouring woods and the meadow-land around the hill Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the minds of the late Comtes family so that when Godfrey innocent cause of the whole tragedy and now bearing the title was killed by an arrow whilst hunting at the age of thirty-two there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise But when years afterward the next young Comte Robert by name was found dead in a nearby field from no apparent cause the peasants told in whispers that their seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-second birthday when surprised by early death Louis son to Robert was found drowned in the moat at the same fateful age and thus down through the centuries ran the ominous chronicle Henris Roberts Antoines and Armands snatched from happy and virtuous lives when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to me by the words which I read My life previously held at small value now became dearer to me each day as I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the hidden world of black magic Isolated as I was modern science had produced no impression upon me and I laboured as in the Middle Ages as wrapt as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition of daemonological and alchemical learning Yet read as I might in no manner could I account for the strange curse upon my line In unusually rational moments I would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation attributing the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs yet having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the alchemist I would fall back to occult studies and once more endeavour to find a spell that would release my house from its terrible burden Upon one thing I was absolutely resolved I should never wed for since no other branches of my family were in existence I might thus end the curse with myself As I drew near the age of thirty old Pierre was called to the land beyond Alone I buried him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to wander in life Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human creature within the great fortress and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its vain protest against the impending doom to become almost reconciled to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met Much of my time was now occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the old chateau which in youth fear had caused me to shun and some of which old Pierre had once told me had not been trodden by human foot for over four centuries Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered Furniture covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness met my eyes Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun everywhere and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of the otherwise untenanted gloom Of my exact age even down to days and hours I kept a most careful record for each movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so much more of my doomed existence At length I approached that time which I had so long viewed with apprehension Since most of my ancestors had been seized some little while before they reached the exact age of Comte Henri at his end I was every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death In what strange form the curse should overtake me I knew not but I was resolved at least that it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim With new vigour I applied myself to my examination of the old chateau and its contents It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted portion of the castle less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must mark the utmost limit of my stay on earth beyond which I could have not even the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath that I came upon the culminating event of my whole life I had spent the better part of the morning in climbing up and down half-ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated of the ancient turrets As the afternoon progressed I sought the lower levels descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement or a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder As I slowly traversed the nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last staircase the paving became very damp and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank water-stained wall impeded my journey Turning to retrace my steps my eye fell upon a small trap-door with a ring which lay directly beneath my feet Pausing I succeeded with difficulty in raising it whereupon there was revealed a black aperture exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter and disclosing in the unsteady glare the top of a flight of stone steps As soon as the torch which I lowered into the repellent depths burned freely and steadily I commenced my descent The steps were many and led to a narrow stone-flagged passage which I knew must be far underground The passage proved of great length and terminated in a massive oaken door dripping with the moisture of the place and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it Ceasing after a time my efforts in this direction I had proceeded back some distance toward the steps when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind Without warning I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges My immediate sensations are incapable of analysis To be confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of the presence of man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the most acute description When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound my eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure It was that of a man clad in a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour His long hair and flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue and of incredible profusion His forehead high beyond the usual dimensions his cheeks deep-sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles and his hands long claw-like and gnarled were of such a deathly marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere seen in man His figure lean to the proportions of a skeleton was strangely bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment But strangest of all were his eyes twin caves of abysmal blackness profound in expression of understanding yet inhuman in degree of wickedness These were now fixed upon me piercing my soul with their hatred and rooting me to the spot whereon I stood At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and latent malevolence The language in which the discourse was clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of the Middle Ages and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the works of the old alchemists and daemonologists The apparition spoke of the curse which had hovered over my house told me of my coming end dwelt on the wrong perpetrated by my ancestor against old Michel Mauvais and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier He told how the young Charles had escaped into the night returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as he approached the age which had been his fathers at his assassination how he had secretly returned to the estate and established himself unknown in the even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the hideous narrator how he had seized Robert son of Godfrey in a field forced poison down his throat and left him to die at the age of thirty-two thus maintaining the foul provisions of his vengeful curse At this point I was left to imagine the solution of the greatest mystery of all how the curse had been fulfilled since that time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of Nature have died for the man digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two wizards father and son speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook of it eternal life and youth His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the hatred that had at first so haunted them but suddenly the fiendish glare returned and with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent the stranger raised a glass phial with the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier six hundred years before ended that of my ancestor Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defence I broke through the spell that had hitherto held me immovable and flung my now dying torch at the creature who menaced my existence I heard the phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit the horrid scene with a ghastly radiance The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted by the would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves and I fell prone upon the slimy floor in a total faint When at last my senses returned all was frightfully dark and my mind remembering what had occurred shrank from the idea of beholding more yet curiosity overmastered all Who I asked myself was this man of evil and how came he within the castle walls Why should he seek to avenge the death of poor Michel Mauvais and how had the curse been carried on through all the long centuries since the time of Charles Le Sorcier The dread of years was lifted from my shoulders for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source of all my danger from the curse and now that I was free I burned with the desire to learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for centuries and made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare Determined upon further exploration I felt in my pockets for flint and steel and lit the unused torch which I had with me First of all the new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the mysterious stranger The hideous eyes were now closed Disliking the sight I turned away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door Here I found what seemed much like an alchemists laboratory In one corner was an immense pile of a shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch It may have been gold but I did not pause to examine it for I was strangely affected by that which I had undergone At the farther end of the apartment was an opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside forest Filled with wonder yet now realising how the man had obtained access to the chateau I proceeded to return I had intended to pass by the remains of the stranger with averted face but as I approached the body I seemed to hear emanating from it a faint sound as though life were not yet wholly extinct Aghast I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor Then all at once the horrible eyes blacker even than the seared face in which they were set opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret The cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well understand Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier and again I fancied that the words years and curse issued from the twisted mouth Still I was at a loss to gather the purport of his disconnected speech At my evident ignorance of his meaning the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me until helpless as I saw my opponent to be I trembled as I watched him Suddenly the wretch animated with his last burst of strength raised his hideous head from the damp and sunken pavement Then as I remained paralysed with fear he found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever afterward haunted my days and my nights Fool he shrieked can you not guess my secret Have you no brain whereby you may recognise the will which has through six long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon your house Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved I tell you it is I I I that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge FOR I AM CHARLES LE SORCIER 
  AshesBy C M Eddy Jrwith H P Lovecraft Hello Bruce Havent seen you in a dogs age Come in I threw open the door and he followed me into the room His gaunt ungainly figure sprawled awkwardly into the chair I indicated and he twirled his hat between nervous fingers His deepset eyes wore a worried hunted look and he glanced furtively around the room as if searching for a hidden something which might unexpectedly pounce upon him His face was haggard and colorless The corners of his mouth twitched spasmodically Whats the matter old man You look as if youd seen a ghost Brace up I crossed to the buffet and poured a small glass of wine from the decanter Drink this He downed it with a hasty gulp and took to toying with his hat again Thanks PragueI dont feel quite myself tonight You dont look it either Whats wrong Malcolm Bruce shifted uneasily in his chair I eyed him in silence for a moment wondering what could possibly affect the man so strongly I knew Bruce as a man of steady nerves and iron will To find him so visibly upset was in itself unusual I passed cigars and he selected one automatically It was not until the second cigar had been lighted that Bruce broke the silence His nervousness was apparently gone Once more he was the dominant self-reliant figure I knew of old Prague he began Ive just been through the most devilish gruesome experience that ever befell a man I dont know whether I dare tell it or not for fear youll think Ive gone crazyand I wouldnt blame you if you did But its true every word of it He paused dramatically and blew a few rings of smoke in the air I smiled Many a weird tale I had listened to over that self-same table There must have been some kink in my personality that inspired confidence for I had been told stories that some men would have given years of their life to have heard And yet despite my love of the bizarre and the dangerous and my longing to explore far reaches of little-known lands I had been doomed to a life of prosaic flat uneventful business Do you happen to have heard of Professor Van Allister asked Bruce You dont mean Arthur Van Allister The same Then you know him I should say so Known him for years Ever since he resigned as Professor of Chemistry at the College so he could have more time for his experiments Why I even helped him choose the plans for that sound-proof laboratory of his on the top floor of his home Then he got so busy with his confounded experiments he couldnt find time to be chummy You may recall Prague that when we were in college together I used to dabble quite a bit in chemistry I nodded and Bruce continued About four months ago I found myself out of a job Van Allister advertised for an assistant and I answered He remembered me from college days and I managed to convince him I knew enough about chemistry to warrant a trial He had a young lady doing his secretarial worka Miss Marjorie Purdy She was one of these strict-attention-to-business types and as good-looking as she was efficient She had been helping Van Allister a bit in his laboratory and I soon discovered she took a genuine interest in puttering around making experiments of her own Indeed she spent nearly all her spare time with us in the laboratory It was only natural that such companionship should result in a close friendship and it wasnt long before I began to depend on her to help me in difficult experiments when the Professor was busy I never could seem to stump her That girl took to chemistry as a duck takes to water About two months ago Van Allister had the laboratory partitioned off and made a separate workroom for himself He told us that he was about to enter upon a series of experiments which if successful would bring him everlasting fame He flatly refused to make us his confidants in any way shape or manner From that time on Miss Purdy and I were left alone more and more For days at a time the Professor would retire to the seclusion of his new workshop sometimes not even appearing for his meals That meant too that we had more spare time on our hands Our friendship ripened I felt a growing admiration for the trim young woman who seemed perfectly content to fuss around smelly bottles and sticky messes gowned in white from head to foot even to the rubber gloves she wore Day before yesterday Van Allister invited us into his workshop At last I have achieved success he announced holding up for our inspection a small bottle containing a colorless liquid I have here what will rank as the greatest chemical discovery ever known I am going to prove its efficacy right before your eyes Bruce will you bring me one of the rabbits please I went back into the other room and brought him one of the rabbits we kept together with guinea pigs for experimental purposes He put the little animal into a small glass box just large enough to hold it and closed the cover Then he set a glass funnel in a hole in the top of the box and we drew nearer to watch the experiment He uncorked the bottle and poised it above the rabbits prison Now to prove whether my weeks of effort have resulted in success or failure Slowly methodically he emptied the contents of the bottle into the funnel and we watched it trickle into the compartment with the frightened animal Miss Purdy uttered a suppressed cry and I rubbed my eyes to make sure that they had not deceived me For in the case where but a moment before there had been a live terrified rabbit there was now nothing but a pile of soft white ashes Professor Van Allister turned to us with an air of supreme satisfaction His face radiated ghoulish glee and his eyes were alight with a weird insane gleam When he spoke his voice took on a tone of mastery Bruceand you too Miss Purdyit has been your privilege to witness the first successful trial of a preparation that will revolutionize the world It will instantaneously reduce to a fine ash anything with which it comes into contact except glass Just think what that means An army equipped with glass bombs filled with my compound could annihilate the world Wood metal stone brickeverythingswept away before them leaving no more trace than the rabbit I have just experimented uponjust a pile of soft white ashes I glanced at Miss Purdy Her face had gone as white as the apron she wore We watched Van Allister as he transferred all that was left of the bunny to a small bottle and neatly labeled it Ill admit that I was suffering a mental chill myself by the time he dismissed me and we left him alone behind the tightly closed doors of his workshop Once safely outside Miss Purdys nerves gave way completely She reeled and would have fallen had I not caught her in my arms The feel of her soft yielding body held close to my own was the last straw I cast prudence to the winds and crushed her tightly to my breast Kiss after kiss I pressed upon her full red lips until her eyes opened and I saw the lovelight reflected in them After a delicious eternity we came back to earth againlong enough to realize that the laboratory was no place for such ardent demonstrations At any moment Van Allister might come out of his retreat and if he should discover our love-makingin his present state of mindwe dared not think of what might happen For the rest of the day I was like a man in a dream Its a wonder to me that I succeeded in accomplishing anything at all My body was merely an automaton a well-trained machine going about its appointed tasks while my mind soared into far-away realms of delightful day-dreaming Marjorie kept busy with her secretarial work for the rest of the day and not once did I lay eyes upon her until my tasks in the laboratory were completed That night we gave over to the joys of our new-found happiness Prague I shall remember that night as long as I live The happiest moment I have ever known was when Marjorie Purdy promised to become my wife Yesterday was another day of unalloyed bliss All day long my sweetheart and I worked side by side Then followed another night of love-making If youve never been in love with the only girl in the world Prague you cant understand the delirious joy that comes from the very thought of her And Marjorie returned my devotion a hundred-fold She gave herself unreservedly into my keeping Along about noontime today I needed something to complete an experiment and I stepped over to the drug store for it When I returned I missed Marjorie I looked for her hat and coat and they were gone The Professor had not shown himself since the experiment upon the rabbit and was locked in his workshop I asked the servants but none of them had seen her leave the house nor had she left any message for me As the afternoon wore on I grew frantic Evening came and still no sign of my dear little girl All thought of work was forgotten I paced the floor of my room like a caged lion Every jangle of the phone or ring at the door bolstered up my faltering hopes of some word from her but each time I was doomed to disappointment Each minute seemed an hour each hour an eternity Good God Prague You cant imagine how I suffered From the heights of sublime love I mentally plunged to the darkest depths of despair I conjured visions of all sorts of terrible fates overtaking her Still not a word did I hear It seemed to me that I had lived a lifetime but my watch told me it was only half-past seven when the butler told me that Van Allister wanted me in the laboratory I was in no mood for experiments but while I was under his roof he was my master and it was for me to obey The Professor was in his workshop the door slightly ajar He called to me to close the door of the laboratory and join him in the little room In my present state of mind my brain photographed every minute detail of the scene which met my eyes In the center of the room on a marble-top table was a glass case about the shape and size of a coffin It was filled almost to the brim with that same colorless liquid which the small bottle had contained two days before At the left on a glass-top tabourette was a newly labeled glass jar I could not repress an involuntary shudder as I realized that it was filled with soft white ashes Then I saw something that almost made my heart stop beating On a chair in a far corner of the workshop was the hat and coat of the girl who had pledged her life to minethe girl whom I had vowed to cherish and protect while life should last My senses were numbed my soul surcharged with horror as realization flashed over me There could be but one explanation The ashes in that jar were the ashes of Marjorie Purdy The world stood still for one long terrible moment and then I went madstark staring mad The next I can remember the Professor and I were locked in a desperate struggle Old as he was he still possessed a strength nearly equal to mine and he had the added advantage of calm self-possession Closer and closer he forced me to the glass coffin A few moments more and my ashes would join those of the girl I had loved I stumbled against the tabourette and my fingers closed over the jar of ashes With one last superhuman effort I raised it high above my head and brought it down with crushing force upon the skull of my antagonist His arm relaxed his limp form dropped in a senseless heap to the floor Still acting upon impulse I raised the silent form of the Professor and carefully lest I should spill some of it on the floor lowered the body into the casket of death A moment and it was over Professor and liquid both were gone and in their place was a little pile of soft white ashes As I gazed at my handiwork the brainstorm passed away and I came face to face with the cold hard truth that I had killed a fellow-being An unnatural calm possessed me I knew that there was not a single shred of evidence against me barring the fact that I was the last one known to be alone with the Professor Nothing remained but ashes I put on my hat and coat told the butler that the Professor had left word he was not to be disturbed and that I was going out for the evening Once outside all my self-possession vanished My nerves were shot to pieces I dont know where I wentonly that I wandered aimlessly here and there until I found myself outside your apartment just a little while ago Prague I felt as if I must talk with someone that I must unburden my tortured mind I knew that I could trust you old pal so Ive told you the whole story Here I amdo with me as you will Life holds nothing more for me now thatMarjorieis gone Bruces voice trembled with emotion and broke as he mentioned the name of the girl he loved I leaned across the table and gazed searchingly into the eyes of the abject figure that slouched dejectedly in the big chair Then I rose put on my hat and coat crossed to Bruce who had buried his head in his hands and was shaking with silent sobs Bruce Malcolm Bruce raised his eyes Bruce listen to me Are you sure Marjorie Purdy is dead Am I sure that His eyes widened at the suggestion and he sat erect with a sudden start Exactly I went on Are you positive that the ashes in that jar were the ashes of Marjorie Purdy WhyIsee here Prague What are you driving at Then youre not sure You saw the girls hat and coat in that chair and in your state of mind you jumped at conclusions The ashes must be those of the missing girl    The Professor must have made away with her    and all that Come now did Van Allister tell you anything I dont know what he said I tell you I went berserkmad Then you come along with me If shes not dead she must be somewhere in that house and if she is there were going to find her On the street we hailed a taxi and in a few moments the butler admitted us to Van Allisters home Bruce let us into the laboratory with his key The door of the workshop was still ajar My eyes swept the room in a comprehensive survey At the left over near the window was a closed door I strode across the room and tried the knob but it refused to yield Where does that lead Just an anteroom where the Professor keeps his apparatus All the same that doors coming open I returned grimly Stepping back a pace or two I planted a well-directed kick upon the door Another and still another and the frame-work around the lock gave way Bruce with an inarticulate cry sped across the room to a huge mahogany chest He selected one of the keys on his ring inserted it in the lock and flung back the cover with trembling hands Here she is Praguequick Get her out where theres air Together we bore the limp figure of the girl into the laboratory Bruce hastily mixed a concoction which he forced between her lips A second dose and her eyes slowly opened Her bewildered glance traveled around the room at last resting on Bruce and her eyes lighted with sudden happy recognition Later after the first few moments of reunion the girl told us her story After Malcolm went out this afternoon the Professor sent word to me to come into the workshop As he often summoned me to do some errand or other I thought nothing of it and to save time took my hat and coat along He closed the door of the little room and without warning attacked me from behind He overpowered me tied me hand and foot It was needless to gag me As you know the laboratory is absolutely sound-proof Then he produced a huge Newfoundland dog he had secured from somewhere or other reduced it to ashes before my very eyes and put the ashes in a glass jar that was on a tabourette in the workshop He went into the anteroom and from the chest where you found me took out the glass casket At least it seemed a casket to my terror-stricken eyes He mixed enough of his horrible liquid to fill it almost to the brim Then he told me that but one thing remained That wasto perform the experiment upon a human being She shuddered at the recollection He dilated at length upon what a privilege it would be for anyone to sacrifice his life in such a manner for such a cause Then he calmly informed me that he had selected you as the subject of his experiment and that I was to play the role of witness I fainted The Professor must have feared some sort of intrusion for the next I remember is waking inside the chest where you discovered me It was stifling Every breath I took came harder and harder I thought of you Malcolmthought of the wonderful happy hours we had spent together the last few days I wondered what I would do when you were gone I even prayed that he would kill me too My throat grew parched and dryeverything went black before my eyes Next I opened them to find myself herewith you Malcolm her voice sank to a hoarse nervous whisper Wherewhere is the Professor Bruce silently led her into the workshop She shivered as the coffin of glass came within her range of vision Still silently he crossed directly to the casket and taking up a handful of the soft white ashes let them sift slowly through his fingers 
  At the Mountains of MadnessBy H P Lovecraft I I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarcticwith its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-capand I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain Doubt of the real facts as I must reveal them is inevitable yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left The hitherto withheld photographs both ordinary and arial will count in my favour for they are damnably vivid and graphic Still they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried The ink drawings of course will be jeered at as obvious impostures notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have on the one hand sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles and on the other hand sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates connected only with a small university have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned It is further against us that we are not in the strictest sense specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned As a geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent aided by the remarkable drill devised by Prof Frank H Pabodie of our engineering department I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection Pabodies drilling apparatus as the public already knows from our reports was unique and radical in its lightness portability and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness Steel head jointed rods gasoline motor collapsible wooden derrick dynamiting paraphernalia cording rubbish-removal auger and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to  feet deep all formed with needed accessories no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry this being made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned Four large Dornier aroplanes designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic seasonor longer if absolutely necessarywould permit operating mostly in the mountain-ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton Amundsen Scott and Byrd With frequent changes of camp made by aroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earths past That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens marine fauna arachnida and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals is a matter of common information and we hoped to expand that information in variety accuracy and detail When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs we would enlarge the aperture by blasting in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition Our borings of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or rock were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed land surfacesthese inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of mere glaciation though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo It is this planwhich we could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as oursthat the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself We consisted of four men from the UniversityPabodie Lake of the biology department Atwood of the physics department also a meteorologist and I representing geology and having nominal commandbesides sixteen assistants seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics Of these sixteen twelve were qualified aroplane pilots all but two of whom were competent wireless operators Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant as did Pabodie Atwood and I In addition of course our two shipswooden ex-whalers reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steamwere fully manned The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation aided by a few special contributions financed the expedition hence our preparations were extremely thorough despite the absence of great publicity The dogs sledges machines camp materials and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston and there our ships were loaded We were marvellously well-equipped for our specific purposes and in all matters pertaining to supplies regimen transportation and camp construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expeditionample though it wasso little noticed by the world at large As the newspapers told we sailed from Boston Harbour on September   taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal and stopping at Samoa and Hobart Tasmania at which latter place we took on final supplies None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before hence we all relied greatly on our ship captainsJ B Douglas commanding the brig Arkham and serving as commander of the sea party and Georg Thorfinnssen commanding the barque Miskatonicboth veteran whalers in antarctic waters As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day At about  South Latitude we sighted our first icebergstable-like objects with vertical sidesand just before reaching the Antarctic Circle which we crossed on October  with appropriately quaint ceremonies we were considerably troubled with field ice The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours to come On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly these including a strikingly vivid miragethe first I had ever seenin which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles Pushing through the ice which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed we regained open water at South Latitude  East Longitude  On the morning of October  a strong land blink appeared on the south and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast lofty and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude   The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow bluish ice and water lanes and black bits of exposed granite slope Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping with notes extending over a wide range and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred I was rather sorry later on that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library On the seventh of November sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost we passed Franklin Island and the next day descried the cones of Mts Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond There now stretched off to the east the low white line of the great ice barrier rising perpendicularly to a height of  feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec and marking the end of southward navigation In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt Erebus The scoriac peak towered up some  feet against the eastern sky like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama while beyond it rose the white ghost-like height of Mt Terror  feet in altitude and now extinct as a volcano Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently and one of the graduate assistantsa brilliant young fellow named Danforthpointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope remarking that this mountain discovered in  had undoubtedly been the source of Poes image when he wrote seven years later of the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek In the ultimate climes of the pole That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the boreal pole Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material and had talked a good deal of Poe I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poes only long storythe disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym On the barren shore and on the lofty ice barrier in the background myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins while many fat seals were visible on the water swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice Using small boats we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the th carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement Our sensations on first treading antarctic soil were poignant and complex even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcanos slope was only a provisional one headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham We landed all our drilling apparatus dogs sledges tents provisions gasoline tanks experimental ice-melting outfit cameras both ordinary and arial aroplane parts and other accessories including three small portable wireless outfits besides those in the planes capable of communicating with the Arkhams large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit The ships outfit communicating with the outside world was to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertisers powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head Mass We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer but if this proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for another summers supplies I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work of our ascent of Mt Erebus our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodies apparatus accomplished them even through solid rock layers our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies and our final assembling of five huge aroplanes at the camp atop the barrier The health of our land partytwenty men and  Alaskan sledge dogswas remarkable though of course we had so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms For the most part the thermometer varied between zero and  or  above and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigours of this sort The barrier camp was semi-permanent and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline provisions dynamite and other supplies Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material the fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes were lost Later when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus we would employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the great plateau from  to  miles southward beyond Beardmore Glacier Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau we determined to dispense with intermediate bases taking our chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour non-stop flight of our squadron on November  over the lofty shelf ice with vast peaks rising on the west and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines Wind troubled us only moderately and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered When the vast rise loomed ahead between Latitudes  and  we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier the largest valley glacier in the world and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coastline At last we were truly entering the white aeon-dead world of the ultimate south and even as we realised it we saw the peak of Mt Nansen in the eastern distance towering up to its height of almost  feet The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude   East Longitude   and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aroplane flights are matters of history as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate studentsGedney and Carrollon December  We were some  feet above sea-level and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with the great bulk of the continent to the west but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below South Americawhich we then thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis In certain of the sandstones dynamited and chiselled after boring revealed their nature we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragmentsnotably ferns seaweeds trilobites crinoids and such molluscs as lingulae and gasteropodsall of which seemed of real significance in connexion with the regions primordial history There was also a queer triangular striated marking about a foot in greatest diameter which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture These fragments came from a point to the westward near the Queen Alexandra Range and Lake as a biologist seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and provocative though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression On January   Lake Pabodie Danforth all six of the students four mechanics and I flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes being forced down once by a sudden high wind which fortunately did not develop into a typical storm This was as the papers have stated one of several observation flights during others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions of which our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold silver and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying  miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller continental division as we mistakenly conceived it Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes of comparison Our health so far had remained excellent lime-juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food and temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs It was now midsummer and with haste and care we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west but we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks and reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny The outside world knew of course of our programme and was told also of Lakes strange and dogged insistence on a westwardor rather northwestwardprospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base It seems he had pondered a great deal and with alarmingly radical daring over that triangular striated marking in the slate reading into it certain contradictions in Nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky unknown and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a dateCambrian if not actually pre-Cambrianas to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage These fragments with their odd marking must have been  million to a thousand million years old II Popular imagination I judge responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lakes start northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human imagination though we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionising the entire sciences of biology and geology His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January  with Pabodie and five othersmarred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great pressure-ridges in the icehad brought up more and more of the Archaean slate and even I was interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum These markings however were of very primitive life-forms involving no great paradox except that any life-forms should occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be hence I still failed to see the good sense of Lakes demand for an interlude in our time-saving programmean interlude requiring the use of all four planes many men and the whole of the expeditions mechanical apparatus I did not in the end veto the plan though I decided not to accompany the northwestward party despite Lakes plea for my geological advice While they were gone I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final plans for the eastward shift In preparation for this transfer one of the planes had begun to move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound but this could wait temporarily I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs since it is unwise to be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long death Lakes sub-expedition into the unknown as everyone will recall sent out its own reports from the short-wave transmitters on the planes these being simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the Arkham at McMurdo Sound whence they were relayed to the outside world on wave-lengths up to fifty metres The start was made January  at  AM and the first wireless message we received came only two hours later when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting and bore at a point some  miles away from us Six hours after that a second and very excited message told of the frantic beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been sunk and blasted culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several markings approximately like the one which had caused the original puzzlement Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the teeth of a raw and piercing gale and when I despatched a message of protest against further hazards Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any hazard worth taking I saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expeditions success but it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for some  miles to the half-known half-suspected coast-line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands Then in about an hour and a half more came that doubly excited message from Lakes moving plane which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I had accompanied the party  PM On the wing After snowstorm have spied mountain-range ahead higher than any hitherto seen May equal Himalayas allowing for height of plateau Probable Latitude   Longitude   E Reaches far as can see to right and left Suspicion of two smoking cones All peaks black and bare of snow Gale blowing off them impedes navigation After that Pabodie the men and I hung breathlessly over the receiver Thought of this titanic mountain rampart  miles away inflamed our deepest sense of adventure and we rejoiced that our expedition if not ourselves personally had been its discoverers In half an hour Lake called us again Moultons plane forced down on plateau in foothills but nobody hurt and perhaps can repair Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or further moves if necessary but no more heavy plane travel needed just now Mountains surpass anything in imagination Am going up scouting in Carrolls plane with all weight out You cant imagine anything like this Highest peaks must go over  feet Everest out of the running Atwood to work out height with theodolite while Carroll and I go up Probably wrong about cones for formations look stratified Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in Queer skyline effectsregular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks Whole thing marvellous in red-gold light of low sun Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder Wish you were here to study Though it was technically sleeping-time not one of us listeners thought for a moment of retiring It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages for Capt Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the important find and Sherman the cache operator seconded his sentiments We were sorry of course about the damaged aroplane but hoped it could be easily mended Then at  PM came another call from Lake Up with Carroll over highest foothills Dont dare try really tall peaks in present weather but shall later Frightful work climbing and hard going at this altitude but worth it Great range fairly solid hence cant get any glimpses beyond Main summits exceed Himalayas and very queer Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate with plain signs of many other upheaved strata Was wrong about volcanism Goes farther in either direction than we can see Swept clear of snow above about  feet Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides and rectangular lines of low vertical ramparts like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerichs paintings Impressive from distance Flew close to some and Carroll thought they were formed of smaller separate pieces but that is probably weathering Most edges crumbled and rounded off as if exposed to storms and climate changes for millions of years Parts especially upper parts seem to be of lighter-coloured rock than any visible strata on slopes proper hence an evidently crystalline origin Close flying shews many cave-mouths some unusually regular in outline square or semicircular You must come and investigate Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one peak Height seems about  to  feet Am up  myself in devilish gnawing cold Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves but no flying danger so far From then on for another half-hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment and expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot I replied that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane and that Pabodie and I would work out the best gasoline planjust where and how to concentrate our supply in view of the expeditions altered character Obviously Lakes boring operations as well as his aroplane activities would need a great deal delivered for the new base which he was to establish at the foot of the mountains and it was possible that the eastward flight might not be made after all this season In connexion with this business I called Capt Douglas and asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single dog-team we had left there A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moultons plane had been forced down and where repairs had already progressed somewhat The ice-sheet was very thin with dark ground here and there visible and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point before making any sledge trips or climbing expeditions He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene and the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the worlds rim Atwoods theodolite observations had placed the height of the five tallest peaks at from  to  feet The windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake for it argued the occasional existence of prodigious gales violent beyond anything we had so far encountered His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills abruptly rose I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his wordsflashed across a glacial void of  milesas he urged that we all hasten with the matter and get the strange new region disposed of as soon as possible He was about to rest now after a continuous days work of almost unparalleled speed strenuousness and results In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Capt Douglas at their widely separated bases and it was agreed that one of Lakes planes would come to my base for Pabodie the five men and myself as well as for all the fuel it could carry The rest of the fuel question depending on our decision about an easterly trip could wait for a few days since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings Eventually the old southern base ought to be restocked but if we postponed the easterly trip we would not use it till the next summer and meanwhile Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period as the case might be If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from Lakes base to the Arkham without returning to this spot Some of our conical tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow and now we decided to complete the job of making a permanent Esquimau village Owing to a very liberal tent supply Lake had with him all that his base would need even after our arrival I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestward move after one days work and one nights rest Our labours however were not very steady after  PM for about that time Lake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages His working day had started unpropitiously since an aroplane survey of the nearly exposed rock surfaces shewed an entire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking and which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalising distance from the camp Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists with now and then a glossy black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal This rather discouraged Lake whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than  million years older It was clear to him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he had found the odd markings he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves He had resolved nevertheless to do some local boring as part of the expeditions general programme hence set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged aroplane The softest visible rocka sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camphad been chosen for the first sampling and the drill made excellent progress without much supplementary blasting It was about three hours afterward following the first really heavy blast of the operation that the shouting of the drill crew was heard and that young Gedneythe acting foremanrushed into the camp with the startling news They had struck a cave Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to a vein of Comanchian limestone full of minute fossil cephalopods corals echini and spirifera and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bonesthe latter probably of teliosts sharks and ganoids This in itself was important enough as affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured but when shortly afterward the drill-head dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy a wholly new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators A good-sized blast had laid open the subterrene secret and now through a jagged aperture perhaps five feet across and three feet thick there yawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the trickling ground waters of a bygone tropic world The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh slightly moving air which suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean system Its roof and floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites some of which met in columnar form but important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones which in places nearly choked the passage Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree-ferns and fungi and forests of Tertiary cycads fan-palms and primitive angiosperms this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous Eocene and other animal species than the greatest palaeontologist could have counted or classified in a year Molluscs crustacean armour fishes amphibians reptiles birds and early mammalsgreat and small known and unknown No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity he scribbled a message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to despatch it by wireless This was my first word of the discovery and it told of the identification of early shells bones of ganoids and placoderms remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts great mososaur skull fragments dinosaur vertebrae and armour-plates pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones archaeopteryx debris Miocene sharks teeth primitive bird-skulls and skulls vertebrae and other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres xiphodons dinocerases eohippi oreodons and titanotheres There was nothing as recent as a mastodon elephant true camel deer or bovine animal hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the Oligocene age and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried dead and inaccessible state for at least thirty million years On the other hand the prevalence of very early life-forms was singular in the highest degree Though the limestone formation was on the evidence of such typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periodseven rudimentary fishes molluscs and corals as remote as the Silurian or Ordovician The inevitable inference was that in this part of the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the life of over  million years ago and that of only thirty million years ago How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene age when the cavern was closed was of course past all speculation In any event the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some  years agoa mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavitymust have put an end to any of the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their common terms Lake was not content to let his first message stand but had another bulletin written and despatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes transmitting to meand to the Arkham for relaying to the outside worldthe frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers Those who followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created among men of science by that afternoons reportsreports which have finally led after all these years to the organisation of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes I had better give the messages literally as Lake sent them and as our base operator McTighe translated them from his pencil shorthand Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments from blasts Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate proving that source survived from over  million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or decadent if anything than older ones Emphasise importance of discovery in press Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions Appears to indicate as I suspected that earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells Was evolved and specialised not later than thousand million years ago when planet was young and recently uninhabitable for any life-forms or normal protoplasmic structure Question arises when where and how development took place  Later Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine saurians and primitive mammals find singular local wounds or injuries to bony structure not attributable to any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any period Of two sortsstraight penetrant bores and apparently hacking incisions One or two cases of cleanly severed bone Not many specimens affected Am sending to camp for electric torches Will extend search area underground by hacking away stalactites  Still later Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch and a half thick wholly unlike any visible local formation Greenish but no evidences to place its period Has curious smoothness and regularity Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in centre of surface Small smooth depression in centre of unbroken surface Arouses much curiosity as to source and weathering Probably some freak of water action Carroll with magnifier thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic significance Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns Dogs growing uneasy as we work and seem to hate this soapstone Must see if it has any peculiar odour Will report again when Mills gets back with light and we start on underground area   PM Important discovery Orrendorf and Watkins working underground at  with light found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts Tough as leather but astonishing flexibility retained in places Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around sides Six feet end to end  feet central diameter tapering to  foot at each end Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves Lateral breakages as of thinnish stalks are at equator in middle of these ridges In furrows between ridges are curious growths Combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans All greatly damaged but one which gives almost seven-foot wing spread Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon These wings seem to be membraneous stretched on framework of glandular tubing Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips Ends of body shrivelled giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there Must dissect when we get back to camp Cant decide whether vegetable or animal Many features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness Have set all hands cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens Additional scarred bones found but these must wait Having trouble with dogs They cant endure the new specimen and would probably tear it to pieces if we didnt keep it at a distance from them   PM Attention Dyer Pabodie Douglas Matter of highestI might say transcendentimportance Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at once Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks Mills Boudreau and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground point forty feet from aperture Mixed with curiously rounded and configured soapstone fragments smaller than one previously foundstar-shaped but no marks of breakage except at some of the points Of organic specimens eight apparently perfect with all appendages Have brought all to surface leading off dogs to distance They cannot stand the things Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy Papers must get this right Objects are eight feet long all over Six-foot five-ridged barrel torso  feet central diameter  foot end diameters Dark grey flexible and infinitely tough Seven-foot membraneous wings of same colour found folded spread out of furrows between ridges Wing framework tubular or glandular of lighter grey with orifices at wing tips Spread wings have serrated edge Around equator one at central apex of each of the five vertical stave-like ridges are five systems of light grey flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over  feet Like arms of primitive crinoid Single stalks  inches diameter branch after  inches into five sub-stalks each of which branches after  inches into five small tapering tentacles or tendrils giving each stalk a total of  tentacles At top of torso blunt bulbous neck of lighter grey with gill-like suggestions holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colours Head thick and puffy about  feet point to point with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point Slit in exact centre of top probably breathing aperture At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy red-irised globe evidently an eye Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in sac-like swellings of same colour which upon pressure open to bell-shaped orifices  inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp white tooth-like projections Probable mouths All these tubes cilia and points of starfish-head found folded tightly down tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness At bottom of torso rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist Bulbous light-grey pseudo-neck without gill suggestions holds greenish five-pointed starfish-arrangement Tough muscular arms  feet long and tapering from  inches diameter at base to about  at point To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membraneous triangle  inches long and  wide at farther end This is the paddle fin or pseudo-foot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old From inner angles of starfish-arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from  inches diameter at base to  at tip Orifices at tips All these parts infinitely tough and leathery but extremely flexible Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort marine or otherwise When moved display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity As found all these projections tightly folded over pseudo-neck and end of torso corresponding to projections at other end Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom but odds now favour animal Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive features Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat but may have use in water navigation Symmetry is curiously vegetable-like suggesting vegetables essentially up-and-down structure rather than animals fore-and-aft structure Fabulously early date of evolution preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known baffles all conjecture as to origin Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smiths nightmare paintings based on text and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken ofCthulhu cult appendages etc Vast field of study opened Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period judging from associated specimens Massive stalagmites deposited above them Hard work hewing out but toughness prevented damage State of preservation miraculous evidently owing to limestone action No more found so far but will resume search later Job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without dogs which bark furiously and cant be trusted near them With nine menthree left to guard the dogswe ought to manage the three sledges fairly well though wind is bad Must establish plane communication with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material But Ive got to dissect one of these things before we take any rest Wish I had a real laboratory here Dyer better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip First the worlds greatest mountains and then this If this last isnt the high spot of the expedition I dont know what is Were made scientifically Congrats Pabodie on the drill that opened up the cave Now will Arkham please repeat description The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost beyond description nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm McTighe who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the droning receiving set wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version as soon as Lakes operator signed off All appreciated the epoch-making significance of the discovery and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkhams operator had repeated back the descriptive parts as requested and my example was followed by Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache as well as by Capt Douglas of the Arkham Later as head of the expedition I added some remarks to be relayed through the Arkham to the outside world Of course rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement and my only wish was to get to Lakes camp as quickly as I could It disappointed me when he sent word that a rising mountain gale made early arial travel impossible But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment Lake was sending more messages and told of the completely successful transportation of the fourteen great specimens to the camp It had been a hard pull for the things were surprisingly heavy but nine men had accomplished it very neatly Now some of the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp to which the dogs could be brought for greater convenience in feeding The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts at dissection This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected for despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent the deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimena powerful and intact onelost nothing of their more than leathery toughness Lake was puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for He had it is true seven more perfect specimens but these were too few to use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged in one which though having remnants of the starfish-arrangements at both ends was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great torso furrows Results quickly reported over the wireless were baffling and provocative indeed Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue but the little that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered Existing biology would have to be wholly revised for this thing was no product of any cell-growth science knows about There had been scarcely any mineral replacement and despite an age of perhaps forty million years the internal organs were wholly intact The leathery undeteriorative and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the things form of organisation and pertained to some palaeogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation At first all that Lake found was dry but as the heated tent produced its thawing effect organic moisture of pungent and offensive odour was encountered toward the things uninjured side It was not blood but a thick dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose By the time Lake reached this stage all  dogs had been brought to the still uncompleted corral near the camp and even at that distance set up a savage barking and show of restlessness at the acrid diffusive smell Far from helping to place the strange entity this provisional dissection merely deepened its mystery All guesses about its external members had been correct and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea It had digestion and circulation and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base Cursorily one would say that its respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide and there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully developed breathing-systemsgills and pores Clearly it was amphibian and probably adapted to long airless hibernation-periods as well Vocal organs seemed present in connexion with the main respiratory system but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution Articulate speech in the sense of syllable-utterance seemed barely conceivable but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable The muscular system was almost preternaturally developed The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects the thing had a set of ganglial centres and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialised development Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced and there were signs of a sensory equipment served in part through the wiry cilia of the head involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism Probably it had more than five senses so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy It must Lake thought have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its primal world much like the ants and bees of today It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams especially the pteridophytes having spore-cases at the tips of the wings and evidently developing from a thallus or prothallus But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly It looked like a radiate but was clearly something more It was partly vegetable but had three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure That it was marine in origin its symmetrical contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated yet one could not be exact as to the limit of its later adaptations The wings after all held a persistent suggestion of the arial How it could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from Outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonics English department Naturally he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints having been made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens but quickly rejected this too facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils If anything the later contours shewed decadence rather than higher evolution The size of the pseudo-feet had decreased and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified Moreover the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent Altogether little could be said to have been solved and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional namejocosely dubbing his finds The Elder Ones At about  AM having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin emerged from the laboratory tent and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle so that the head-points and tubes of two or three shewed signs of unfolding but Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost sub-zero air He did however move all the undissected specimens closer together and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays That would also help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs whose hostile unrest was really becoming a problem even at their substantial distance and behind the higher and higher snow walls which an increased quota of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters He had to weight down the corners of the tent-cloth with heavy blocks of snow to hold it in place amidst the rising gale for the titan mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts Early apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived and under Atwoods supervision precautions were taken to bank the tents new dog-corral and crude aroplane shelters with snow on the mountainward side These latter shelters begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments were by no means as high as they should have been and Lake finally detached all hands from other tasks to work on them It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little higher He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether and repeated his praise of the really marvellous drills that had helped him make his discovery Atwood also sent greetings and praises I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation owning up that he was right about the western trip and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in the morning If the gale was then over Lake would send a plane for the party at my base Just before retiring I despatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about toning down the days news for the outside world since the full details seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated III None of us I imagine slept very heavily or continuously that morning for both the excitement of Lakes discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against such a thing So savage was the blast even where we were that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lakes camp directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it McTighe was awake at ten oclock and tried to get Lake on the wireless as agreed but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward seemed to prevent communication We did however get the Arkham and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake He had not known about the wind for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound despite its persistent rage where we were Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals but invariably without results About noon a positive frenzy of wind stampeded out of the west causing us to fear for the safety of our camp but it eventually died down with only a moderate relapse at  PM After three oclock it was very quiet and we redoubled our efforts to get Lake Reflecting that he had four planes each provided with an excellent short-wave outfit we could not imagine any ordinary accident capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at once Nevertheless the stony silence continued and when we thought of the delirious force the wind must have had in his locality we could not help making the most direful conjectures By six oclock our fears had become intense and definite and after a wireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward investigation The fifth aroplane which we had left at the McMurdo Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors was in good shape and ready for instant use and it seemed that the very emergency for which it had been saved was now upon us I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible the air conditions being apparently highly favourable We then talked over the personnel of the coming investigation party and decided that we would include all hands together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me Even so great a load would not be too much for one of the huge planes built to our especial orders for heavy machinery transportation At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the wireless but all to no purpose Sherman with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen took off at  and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing They arrived at our base at midnight and all hands at once discussed the next move It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single aroplane without any line of bases but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity We turned in at two oclock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane but were up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing At  AM January th we started flying northwestward under McTighes pilotage with ten men seven dogs a sledge a fuel and food supply and other items including the planes wireless outfit The atmosphere was clear fairly quiet and relatively mild in temperature and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp Our apprehensions were over what we might find or fail to find at the end of our journey for silence continued to answer all calls despatched to the camp Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its crucial position in my life It marked my loss at the age of fifty-four of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Natures laws Thenceforward the ten of usbut the student Danforth and myself above all otherswere to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane telling of our non-stop course our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before and our sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow-cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau There came a point though when our sensations could not be conveyed in any words the press would understand and a later point when we had to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witch-like cones and pinnacles ahead and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane Despite our speed they were very slow in gaining prominence hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off and visible only because of their abnormal height Little by little however they rose grimly into the western sky allowing us to distinguish various bare bleak blackish summits and to catch the curious sense of phantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds In the whole spectacle there was a persistent pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation as if these stark nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream and complex gulfs of remote time space and ultra-dimensionality I could not help feeling that they were evil thingsmountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss That seething half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness separateness desolation and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skylineregularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes which Lake had mentioned in his messages and which indeed justified his comparison with the dream-like suggestions of primordial temple-ruins on cloudy Asian mountain-tops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land and I felt it afresh now I felt too another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia but the racial memory of manor of his predecessorsis long and it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself Leng wherever in space or time it might brood was not a region I would care to be in or near nor did I relish the proximity of a world that had ever bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie There were truncated cones sometimes terraced or fluted surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs and strange beetling table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer giganticism The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the Arctic whaler Scoresby in  but at this time and place with those dark unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent I was glad when the mirage began to break up though in the process the various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted temporary forms of even vaster hideousness As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we began to look earthward again and saw that our journeys end was not far off The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzyingly up like a fearsome rampart of giants their curious regularities shewing with startling clearness even without a field-glass We were over the lowest foothills now and could see amidst the snow ice and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lakes camp and boring The higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks beyond them At length Ropesthe student who had relieved McTighe at the controlsbegan to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose size marked it as the camp As he did so McTighe sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition Everyone of course has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our antarctic sojourn Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we found and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the frightful wind of the preceding day or of the night before that Eleven known dead young Gedney missing People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realisation of the shock the sad event must have caused us and believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside Indeed I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress utter bewilderment and soul-clutching horror we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific instance The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tellwhat I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc Whether all could have lived through it even without the other thing is gravely open to doubt The storm with its fury of madly driven ice-particles must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before One aroplane shelterall it seems had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate statewas nearly pulverised and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking Wooden surfaces left out in the blast were pitted and denuded of paint and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated It is also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition to take outside as a whole We did gather some minerals from a vast tumbled pile including several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful comparisons and some fossil bones among which were the most typical of the curiously injured specimens None of the dogs survived their hurriedly built snow enclosure near the camp being almost wholly destroyed The wind may have done that though the greater breakage on the side next the camp which was not the windward one suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beasts themselves All three sledges were gone and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unknown The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken-up of the planes since our surviving party had only four real pilotsSherman Danforth McTighe and Ropesin all with Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate We brought back all the books scientific equipment and other incidentals we could find though much was rather unaccountably blown away Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out of condition It was approximately  PM after wide plane cruising had forced us to give Gedney up for lost that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying and I think we did well to keep it as calm and non-committal as we succeeded in doing The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor Lakes accounts We did not mention I think their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region objects including scientific instruments aroplanes and machinery both at the camp and at the boring whose parts had been loosened moved or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harboured singular curiosity and investigativeness About the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably indefinite We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged but that enough was left of them to prove Lakes description wholly and impressively accurate It was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matterand we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of Lakes men and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly like those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away We were careful too about the publics general peace of mind hence Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such height which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us On our return at  AM Danforth was close to hysterics but kept an admirably stiff upper lip It took no persuasion to make him promise not to shew our sketches and the other things we brought away in our pockets not to say anything more to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside and to hide our camera films for private development later on so that part of my present story will be as new to Pabodie McTighe Ropes Sherman and the rest as it will be to the world in general IndeedDanforth is closer mouthed than I for he sawor thinks he sawone thing he will not tell even me As all know our report included a tale of a hard ascent a confirmation of Lakes opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Comanchian times a conventional comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and rampart formations a decision that the cave-mouths indicate dissolved calcareous veins a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling and crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers and a remark that the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense super-plateau as ancient and unchanging as the mountains themselves feet in elevation with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes and it completely satisfied the men at the camp We laid our absence of sixteen hoursa longer time than our announced flying landing reconnoitring and rock-collecting programme called forto a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our flight Had any tried to do that I would have used every ounce of my persuasion to stop themand I do not know what Danforth would have done While we were gone Pabodie Sherman Ropes McTighe and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lakes two best planes fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base as soon as possible Even though indirect that was the safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound for a straight-line flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many additional hazards Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery and the doubts and horrors around uswhich we did not revealmade us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could As the public knows our return to the world was accomplished without further disasters All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next dayJanuary thafter a swift non-stop flight and on the th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps the one pause being very brief and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice-shelf after we had cleared the great plateau In five days more the Arkham and Miskatonic with all hands and equipment on board were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the winds wails into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted accursed realm where life and death space and time have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planets scarce-cooled crust Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic exploration and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness Even young Danforth with his nervous breakdown has not flinched or babbled to his doctorsindeed as I have said there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me though I think it would help his psychological state if he would consent to do so It might explain and relieve much though perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock That is the impression I gather after those rare irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to methings which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south and some of our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying and that the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown Lakes reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and palaeontologists to the highest pitch though we were sensible enough not to shew the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens or our photographs of those specimens as they were found We also refrained from shewing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the super-plateau across the range and the crumpled things we smoothed studied in terror and brought away in our pockets But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organising and with a thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted If not dissuaded they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know So I must break through all reticences at lasteven about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness IV It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lakes camp and what we really found thereand to that other thing beyond the frightful mountain wall I am constantly tempted to shirk the details and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable deductions I hope I have said enough already to let me glide briefly over the rest the rest that is of the horror at the camp I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain the damaged shelters the disarranged machinery the varied uneasinesses of our dogs the missing sledges and other items the deaths of men and dogs the absence of Gedney and the six insanely buried biological specimens strangely sound in texture for all their structural injuries from a world forty million years dead I do not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing We did not think much about that till laterindeed only Danforth and I have thought of it at all The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos At the time I tried to keep the mens minds off those points for it was so much simplerso much more normalto lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lakes party From the look of things that daemon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of this centre of all earthly mystery and desolation The crowning abnormality of course was the condition of the bodiesmen and dogs alike They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways Death so far as we could judge had in each case come from strangulation or laceration The dogs had evidently started the trouble for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain When left alone in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height they must have stampededwhether from the wind itself or from some subtle increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens one could not say Those specimens of course had been covered with a tent-cloth yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity But whatever had happened it was hideous and revolting enough Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at lastthough with a categorical statement of opinion based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious cold-blooded and inhuman fashion It was the same with dogs and men All the healthier fatter bodies quadrupedal or bipedal had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed as by a careful butcher and around them was a strange sprinkling of salttaken from the ravaged provision-chests on the planeswhich conjured up the most horrible associations The thing had occurred in one of the crude aroplane shelters from which the plane had been dragged out and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory Scattered bits of clothing roughly slashed from the human incision-subjects hinted no clues It is useless to bring up the half-impression of certain faint snow-prints in one shielded corner of the ruined enclosurebecause that impression did not concern human prints at all but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the preceding weeks One had to be careful of ones imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness As I have indicated Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the end When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two men but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent which we entered after investigating the monstrous graves had something to reveal It was not as Lake had left it for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table Indeed we had already realised that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried things we had foundthe one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful odourmust represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake had tried to analyse On and around that laboratory table were strown other things and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog I shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the mans identity Lakes anatomical instruments were missing but there were evidences of their careful cleansing The gasoline stove was also gone though around it we found a curious litter of matches We buried the human parts beside the other ten men and the canine parts with the other  dogs Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it we were much too bewildered to speculate This formed the worst of the camp horror but other things were equally perplexing The disappearance of Gedney the one dog the eight uninjured biological specimens the three sledges and certain instruments illustrated technical and scientific books writing materials electric torches and batteries food and fuel heating apparatus spare tents fur suits and the like was utterly beyond sane conjecture as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink-blots on certain pieces of paper and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both at the camp and at the boring The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered machinery Then too there was the upsetting of the larder the disappearance of certain staples and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places The profusion of scattered matches intact broken or spent formed another minor enigma as did the two or three tent-cloths and fur suits which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean specimens were all of a piece with this apparent disintegrative madness In view of just such an eventuality as the present one we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at the camp and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds We could not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds with their clusters of grouped dots to poor Lakes descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very close indeed The whole general formation it must be made clear seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish-head of the Archaean entities and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitised minds of Lakes overwrought party Our own first sight of the actual buried entities formed a horrible moment and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the shocking primal myths we had read and heard We all agreed that the mere sight and continued presence of the things must have coperated with the oppressive polar solitude and daemon mountain wind in driving Lakes party mad For madnesscentring in Gedney as the only possible surviving agentwas the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was concerned though I will not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely Sherman Pabodie and McTighe made an exhaustive aroplane cruise over all the surrounding territory in the afternoon sweeping the horizon with field-glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various missing things but nothing came to light The party reported that the titan barrier range extended endlessly to right and left alike without any diminution in height or essential structure On some of the peaks though the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and plainer having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins The distribution of cryptical cave-mouths on the black snow-denuded summits seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced In spite of all the prevailing horrors we were left with enough sheer scientific zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond those mysterious mountains As our guarded messages stated we rested at midnight after our day of terror and bafflement but not without a tentative plan for one or more range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with arial camera and geologists outfit beginning the following morning It was decided that Danforth and I try it first and we awaked at  AM intending an early trip though heavy windsmentioned in our brief bulletin to the outside worlddelayed our start till nearly nine oclock I have already repeated the non-committal story we told the men at campand relayed outsideafter our return sixteen hours later It is now my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hidden trans-montane worldhints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saweven though it was probably a nervous delusionand which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is but he is firm against that All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I shared This will form my last word If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner antarcticor at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman aeon-cursed desolationthe responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immensurable evils will not be mine Danforth and I studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and checking up with a sextant had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us within sight of camp and about  or  feet above sea-level For this point then we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery The camp itself on foothills which sprang from a high continental plateau was some  feet in altitude hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose for on account of visibility conditions we had to leave the cabin windows open We were dressed of course in our heaviest furs As we drew near the forbidding peaks dark and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lakes bulletins and proved that these hoary pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earths historyperhaps over fifty million years How much higher they had once been it was futile to guess but everything about this strange region pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavourable to change and calculated to retard the usual climatic processes of rock disintegration But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes ramparts and cave-mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most I studied them with a field-glass and took arial photographs whilst Danforth drove and at times relieved him at the controlsthough my aviation knowledge was purely an amateursin order to let him use the binoculars We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a lightish Archaean quartzite unlike any formation visible over broad areas of the general surface and that their regularity was extreme and uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted As he had said their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them from obliteration Many parts especially those closest to the slopes seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes or the primal foundation-walls of Kish as dug up by the OxfordField Museum Expedition in  and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist Igneous formations often have strange regularitieslike the famous Giants Causeway in Irelandbut this stupendous range despite Lakes original suspicion of smoking cones was above all else non-volcanic in evident structure The curious cave-mouths near which the odd formations seemed most abundant presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of outline They were as Lakes bulletin had said often approximately square or semicircular as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns but we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites Outside those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the relatively low pass we had selected As we advanced we occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land route wondering whether we could have attempted the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go and that despite the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott a Shackleton or an Amundsen Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity and upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no exception Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper even though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially different from those already seen and traversed The touch of evil mystery in these barrier mountains and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic associationa thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes Even the winds burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity and for a second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions We were now after a slow ascent at a height of  feet according to the aneroid and had left the region of clinging snow definitely below us Up here were only dark bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciersbut with those provocative cubes ramparts and echoing cave-mouths to add a portent of the unnatural the fantastic and the dream-like Looking along the line of high peaks I thought I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake with a rampart exactly on top It seemed to be half-lost in a queer antarctic haze such a haze perhaps as had been responsible for Lakes early notion of volcanism The pass loomed directly before us smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling vapours and lighted by the low polar sunthe sky of that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm Danforth and I unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling piping wind that raced through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines exchanged eloquent glances And then having gained those last few feet we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth V I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe wonder terror and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond Of course we must have had some natural theory in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert Perhaps we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first approaching those mountains of madness We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal regular and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest and in places obviously thinner The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset Here on a hellishly ancient table-land fully  feet high and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than  years ago there stretched nearly to the visions limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause We had previously dismissed so far as serious thought was concerned any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin How could they be otherwise when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken for this Cyclopean maze of squared curved and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge It was very clearly the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark objective and ineluctable reality That damnable portent had had a material basis after allthere had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection Of course the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated and had contained things which the real source did not contain yet now as we saw that real source we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image Only the incredible unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousandsperhaps millionsof years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland Corona Mundi    Roof of the World    All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic worldof the daemoniac plateau of Leng of the Mi-Go or Abominable Snow-Men of the Himalayas of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human implications of the Cthulhu cult of the Necronomicon and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless star-spawn associated with that semi-entity For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning indeed as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come We had merely struck at random a limited part of something of incalculable extent The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts These latter as well as the queer cave-mouths were as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains The nameless stone labyrinth consisted for the most part of walls from  to  feet in ice-clear height and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate schist and sandstoneblocks in many cases as large as      feetthough in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate The buildings were far from equal in size there being innumerable honeycomb-arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures The general shape of these things tended to be conical pyramidal or terraced though there were many perfect cylinders perfect cubes clusters of cubes and other rectangular forms and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch and domes had probably existed in the citys heyday The whole tangle was monstrously weathered and the glacial surface from which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles and noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows some of which were closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion Many of the ruins of course were roofless and with uneven though wind-rounded upper edges whilst others of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding structures preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting With the field-glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bandsdecorations including those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice-sheet deeply riven from various geologic causes In other places the stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation One broad swath extending from the plateaus interior to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed was wholly free from buildings and probably represented we concluded the course of some great river which in Tertiary timesmillions of years agohad poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range Certainly this was above all a region of caves gulfs and underground secrets beyond human penetration Looking back to our sensations and recalling our dazedness at viewing this monstrous survival from aeons we had thought pre-human I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we did Of course we knew that somethingchronology scientific theory or our own consciousnesswas woefully awry yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane observe many things quite minutely and take a careful series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead In my case ingrained scientific habit may have helped for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secretto know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had For this place could be no ordinary city It must have formed the primary nucleus and centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earths history whose outward ramifications recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria Commoriom and Uzuldaroum and Olatho in the land of Lomar are recent things of todaynot even of yesterday a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-human blasphemies as Valusia Rlyeh Ib in the land of Mnar and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta As we flew above that tangle of stark titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic associationseven weaving links betwixt this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp The planes fuel-tank in the interest of greater lightness had been only partly filled hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations Even so however we covered an enormous extent of groundor rather airafter swooping down to a level where the wind became virtually negligible There seemed to be no limit to the mountain-range or to the length of the frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills Fifty miles of flight in each direction shewed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like through the eternal ice There were though some highly absorbing diversifications such as the carvings on the canyon where that broad river had once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking-place in the great range The headlands at the streams entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons and something about the ridgy barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague hateful and confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces evidently public squares and noted various undulations in the terrain Where a sharp hill rose it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice but there were at least two exceptions Of these latter one was too badly weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence while the other still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra Flying inland from the mountains we discovered that the city was not of infinite width even though its length along the foothills seemed endless After about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without signs of sentient artifice The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad depressed line while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness seeming to slope slightly upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west So far we had made no landing yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable Accordingly we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our navigable pass there grounding the plane and preparing to do some exploration on foot Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of ruins low flying soon disclosed an ample number of possible landing-places Selecting that nearest to the pass since our next flight would be across the great range and back to camp we succeeded about  PM in coming down on a smooth hard snowfield wholly devoid of obstacles and well adapted to a swift and favourable takeoff later on It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so brief a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged and that the vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against the cold For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs and took with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass hand camera light provisions voluminous notebooks and paper geologists hammer and chisel specimen-bags coil of climbing rope and powerful electric torches with extra batteries this equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a landing take ground pictures make drawings and topographical sketches and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope outcropping or mountain cave Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to tear up place in a spare specimen-bag and use on the ancient principle of hare-and-hounds for marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able to penetrate This had been brought in case we found some cave system with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping method of trail-blazing Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously True we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years agobefore any known race of men could have existedwas none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet For this latter we headed and when at last we were able actually to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species This rampart shaped like a star and perhaps  feet from point to point was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size averaging    feet in surface There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four feet wide and five feet high spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner angles and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface Looking through these we could see that the masonry was fully five feet thick that there were no partitions remaining within and that there were traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls facts we had indeed guessed before when flying low over this rampart and others like it Though lower parts must have originally existed all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearly effaced mural designs but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor Our orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city proper were less ice-choked and that we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down to the true ground level if we entered those structures still roofed at the top Before we left the rampart we photographed it carefully and studied its mortarless Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment We wished that Pabodie were present for his engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city with the upper wind shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background was something whose smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects Between us and the churning vapours of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers its outr and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision It was a mirage in solid stone and were it not for the photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could be The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its infinite bizarrerie endless variety preternatural massiveness and utterly alien exoticism There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a namecones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion shafts with odd bulbous enlargements broken columns in curious groups and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice-sheet and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights Of orderly streets there seemed to be none the only broad open swath being a mile to the left where the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the town into the mountains Our field-glasses shewed the external horizontal bands of nearly effaced sculptures and dot-groups to be very prevalent and we could half imagine what the city must once have looked likeeven though most of the roofs and tower-tops had necessarily perished As a whole it had been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys all of them deep canyons and some little better than tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges Now outspread below us it loomed like a dream-phantasy against a westward mist through whose northern end the low reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine and when for a moment that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful malignity The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there Under the glaciation we believed there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained Danforth was frankly jumpy and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the campwhich I resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity The speculations worked on his imagination too for in one placewhere a debris-littered alley turned a sharp cornerhe insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginary sound from some undefined pointa muffled musical piping he said not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves yet somehow disturbingly different The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place Nevertheless our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead and we mechanically carried out our programme of chipping specimens from all the different rock types represented in the masonry We wished a rather full set in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian periods nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency than the Pliocene age In stark certainty we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least  years and in all probability even longer As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at all available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities Some were above our reach whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill One though spacious and inviting opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of descent Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible grain These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifersespecially Cretaceous cycadsand from fan-palms and early angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be discovered In the placing of these shutterswhose edges shewed the former presence of queer and long-vanished hingesusage seemed to be varied some being on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures They seemed to have become wedged in place thus surviving the rusting of their former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings After a time we came across a row of windowsin the bulges of a colossal five-ridged cone of undamaged apexwhich led into a vast well-preserved room with stone flooring but these were too high in the room to permit of descent without a rope We had a rope with us but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged toespecially in this thin plateau air where great demands were made upon the heart action This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some sort and our electric torches shewed bold distinct and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in broad horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques We took careful note of this spot planning to enter here unless a more easily gained interior were encountered Finally though we did encounter exactly the opening we wished an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high marking the former end of an arial bridge which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present level of glaciation These archways of course were flush with upper-story floors and in this case one of the floors still existed The building thus accessible was a series of rectangular terraces on our left facing westward That across the alley where the other archway yawned was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture It was totally dark inside and the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable emptiness Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance For though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery it required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of a fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming more and more hideously plain to us In the end however we made the plunge and scrambled up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure The floor beyond was of great slate slabs and seemed to form the outlet of a long high corridor with sculptured walls Observing the many inner archways which led off from it and realising the probable complexity of the nest of apartments within we decided that we must begin our system of hare-and-hound trail-blazing Hitherto our compasses together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain-range between the towers in our rear had been enough to prevent our losing our way but from now on the artificial substitute would be necessary Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to shreds of suitable size placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth and prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow This method would probably gain us immunity from straying since there did not appear to be any strong air-currents inside the primordial masonry If such should develop or if our paper supply should give out we could of course fall back on the more secure though more tedious and retarding method of rock-chipping Just how extensive a territory we had opened up it was impossible to guess without a trial The close and frequent connexion of the different buildings made it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice except where impeded by local collapses and geologic rifts for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallise the lower part for all succeeding time Indeed one gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim bygone aeon rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even gradual decay Had the coming of the ice been foreseen and had a nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode The precise physiographic conditions attending the formation of the ice-sheet at this point would have to wait for later solution It had not very plainly been a grinding drive Perhaps the pressure of accumulated snows had been responsible and perhaps some flood from the river or from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the great range had helped to create the special state now observable Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place VI It would be cumbrous to give a detailed consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time after uncounted epochs to the tread of human feet This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth of what we are now disclosing and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film supply with us As it was we made crude notebook sketches of certain salient features after all our films were used up The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls but on the lower levels were excellently preserved Labyrinthine complexity involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels characterised the entire arrangement and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper left behind us We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some  feet to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky Ascent was effected over the steep transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes It might be safe to say that their general average was about    feet in floor area and  feet in height though many larger apartments existed After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level we descended story by story into the submerged part where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about us became curiously oppressive and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours dimensions proportions decorations and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework We soon realised from what the carvings revealed that this monstrous city was many million years old We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses though the function of the arch was clearly much relied on The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all portable contents a circumstance which sustained our belief in the citys deliberate desertion The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement but its preponderance was overwhelming Often however a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands The technique we soon saw was mature accomplished and aesthetically evolved to the highest degree of civilised mastery though utterly alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the human race In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it The minutest details of elaborate vegetation or of animal life were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skilful intricacy The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five The pictorial bands followed a highly formalised tradition and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective but had an artistic force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section with the two-dimensional silhouette and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines whose depth on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches When cartouches with dot-groups appearedevidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and alphabetthe depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half and of the dots perhaps a half-inch more The pictorial bands were in counter-sunk low relief their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall surface In some specimens marks of a former colouration could be detected though for the most part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have been applied The more one studied the marvellous technique the more one admired the things Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists and indeed the very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated We felt too that besides these recognisable excellences there were others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional background and a fuller or different sensory equipment might have made of profound and poignant significance to us The subject-matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanished epoch of their creation and contained a large proportion of evident history It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal racea chance circumstance operating through coincidence miraculously in our favourwhich made the carvings so awesomely informative to us and which caused us to place their photography and transcription above all other considerations In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps astronomical charts and other scientific designs on an enlarged scalethese things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes In hinting at what the whole revealed I can only hope that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those who believe me at all It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot doorways both now and then retaining the petrified wooden plankselaborately carved and polishedof the actual shutters and doors All metal fixtures had long ago vanished but some of the doors remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room Window-frames with odd transparent panesmostly ellipticalsurvived here and there though in no considerable quantity There were also frequent niches of great magnitude generally empty but once in a while containing some bizarre object carved from green soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical facilitiesheating lighting and the likeof a sort suggested in many of the carvings Ceilings tended to be plain but had sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles mostly fallen now Floors were also paved with such tiles though plain stonework predominated As I have said all furniture and other moveables were absent but the sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomb-like echoing rooms Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with detritus litter and debris but farther down this condition decreased In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness Of course where rifts or collapses had occurred the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones A central courtas in other structures we had seen from the airsaved the inner regions from total darkness so that we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying sculptured details Below the ice-cap however the twilight deepened and in many parts of the tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods memories and impressions The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person but added to these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp and the revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist it took only a brief study to give us the hideous trutha truth which it would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other There could now be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago when mans ancestors were primitive archaic mammals and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insistedeach to himselfthat the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull those of Egypt the scarabaeus those of Rome the wolf and the eagle and those of various savage tribes some chosen totem-animal But this lone refuge was now stripped from us and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realisation which the reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated I can scarcely bear to write it down in black and white even now but perhaps that will not be necessary The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs but far worse Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objectsbut the builders of the city were wise and old and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well-nigh a thousand million years    rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells    rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all They were the makers and enslavers of that life and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was youngthe beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred And to think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of their millennially fossilised substance    and that poor Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines    It is of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of pre-human life After the first shock of the certain revelation we had to pause a while to recuperate and it was fully three oclock before we got started on our actual tour of systematic research The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late dateperhaps two million years agoas checked up by geological biological and astronomical features and embodied an art which would be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million yearsto the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceousand contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else with one tremendous exception that we encountered That was we have since agreed the oldest domestic structure we traversed Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public I would refrain from telling what I found and inferred lest I be confined as a madman Of course the infinitely early parts of the patchwork talerepresenting the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets and in other galaxies and in other universescan readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish Naturally no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any connected story nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in their proper order Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their designs were concerned whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground levela cavern perhaps  feet square and sixty feet high which had almost undoubtedly been an educational centre of some sort There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms and buildings since certain chapters of experience and certain summaries or phases of racial history had evidently been favourites with different decorators or dwellers Sometimes though variant versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points and filling in gaps I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal Of course we even now have only the barest outline and much of that was obtained later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made It may be the effect of this later studythe revived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to mewhich has been the immediate source of Danforths present breakdown But it had to be for we could not issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible information and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity Certain lingering influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged VII The full story so far as deciphered will shortly appear in an official bulletin of Miskatonic University Here I shall sketch only the salient high lights in a formless rambling way Myth or otherwise the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent lifeless earth out of cosmic spacetheir coming and the coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membraneous wingsthus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague They had lived under the sea a good deal building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed mans today though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanised life on other planets but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying Their preternatural toughness of organisation and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more specialised fruits of artificial manufacture and even without garments except for occasional protection against the elements It was under the sea at first for food and later for other purposes that they first created earth-lifeusing available substances according to long-known methods The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies They had done the same thing on other planets having manufactured not only necessary foods but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the shoggoths in his frightful Necronomicon though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesised their simple food forms and bred a good supply of shoggoths they allowed other cell-groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes extirpating any whose presence became troublesome With the aid of the shoggoths whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious weights the small low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land Indeed the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the universe and probably retained many traditions of land construction As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured palaeogean cities including that whose aeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing we were impressed by a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to explain even to ourselves The tops of the buildings which in the actual city around us had of course been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago were clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs and shewed vast clusters of needle-like spires delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes and tiers of thin horizontal scalloped discs capping cylindrical shafts This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous mirage cast by a dead city whence such skyline features had been absent for thousands and tens of thousands of years which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lakes ill-fated camp Of the life of the Old Ones both under the sea and after part of them migrated to land volumes could be written Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual waythe writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces Those lower down in the ocean depths though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their headssenses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of light in emergencies Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed curiously during the descent embodying certain apparently chemical coating processesprobably to secure phosphorescencewhich the bas-reliefs could not make clear to us The beings moved in the sea partly by swimmingusing the lateral crinoid armsand partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudo-feet Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fan-like folding wings On land they locally used the pseudo-feet but now and then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate flexible strong and accurate in muscular-nervous cordination ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations The toughness of the things was almost incredible Even the terrific pressures of the deepest sea-bottoms appeared powerless to harm them Very few seemed to die at all except by violence and their burial-places were very limited The fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it The beings multiplied by means of sporeslike vegetable pteridophytes as Lake had suspectedbut owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity and consequent lack of replacement needs they did not encourage the large-scale development of new prothalli except when they had new regions to colonise The young matured swiftly and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph These varied slightly according to sea or land residence but had the same foundations and essentials Though able like vegetables to derive nourishment from inorganic substances they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food They ate uncooked marine life under the sea but cooked their viands on land They hunted game and raised meat herdsslaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvellously and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on howevernearly a million years agothe land dwellers had to resort to special measures including artificial heating until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them back into the sea For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space legend said they had absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating breathing or heat conditions but by the time of the great cold they had lost track of the method In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm Being non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure the Old Ones had no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life but seemed to organise large households on the principles of comfortable space-utility andas we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellerscongenial mental association In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the centre of the huge rooms leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment Lighting in the case of the land inhabitants was accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature Both on land and under water they used curious tables chairs and couches like cylindrical framesfor they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentaclesand racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic though no certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw There was extensive commerce both local and between different cities certain small flat counters five-pointed and inscribed serving as money Probably the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency Though the culture was mainly urban some agriculture and much stock-raising existed Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced Travel was very frequent but permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonising movements by which the race expanded For personal locomotion no external aid was used since in land air and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed Loads however were drawn by beasts of burdenshoggoths under the sea and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence These vertebrates as well as an infinity of other life-formsanimal and vegetable marine terrestrial and arialwere the products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their radius of attention They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the dominant beings Bothersome forms of course were mechanically exterminated It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling primitive mammal used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to palaeontology The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and convulsions of the earths crust was little short of miraculous Though few or none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean age there was no interruption in their civilisation or in the transmission of their records Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the neighbouring South Pacific According to one of the sculptured maps the whole globe was then under water with stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed Another map shews a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole where it is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements though their main centres were transferred to the nearest sea-bottom Later maps which display this land mass as cracking and drifting and sending certain detached parts northward uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor Wegener and Joly With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered yet that was not the worst misfortune Another racea land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhusoon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the seaa colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements Later peace was made and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands New land cities were foundedthe greatest of them in the antarctic for this region of first arrival was sacred From then on as before the antarctic remained the centre of the Old Ones civilisation and all the discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again taking with them the frightful stone city of Rlyeh and all the cosmic octopi so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globehence the recommendation in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodies type of apparatus in certain widely separated regions The steady trend down the ages was from water to land a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses though the ocean was never wholly deserted Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful sea-life depended With the march of time as the sculptures sadly confessed the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable but the shoggoths of the sea reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence presented for a time a formidable problem They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of the Old Ones and had modelled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes exercised independently and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion They had it seems developed a semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it Sculptured images of these shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere They had however a constantly shifting shape and volume throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight hearing and speech in imitation of their masters either spontaneously or according to suggestion They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian age perhaps  million years ago when a veritable war of re-subjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones Pictures of this war and of the headless slime-coated fashion in which the shoggoths typically left their slain victims held a marvellously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against the rebel entities and in the end had achieved a complete victory Thereafter the sculptures shewed a period in which shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys Though during the rebellion the shoggoths had shewn an ability to live out of water this transition was not encouraged since their usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their management During the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion from outer spacethis time by half-fungous half-crustacean creatures from a planet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered Pluto creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north and remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go or Abominable Snow-Men To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted for the first time since their terrene advent to sally forth again into the planetary ether but despite all traditional preparations found it no longer possible to leave the earths atmosphere Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been it was now definitely lost to the race In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was beginning It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries and seem therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space The Old Ones but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties were strictly material and must have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath All this of course assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology Conceivably the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats since historical interest and pride obviously formed their chief psychological element It is significant that their annals failed to mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes In certain cases existing science will require revision while in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed As I have said the hypothesis of Taylor Wegener and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surfacean hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South America and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved upreceives striking support from this uncanny source Maps evidently shewing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe then the Valusia of hellish primal legend Asia the Americas and the antarctic continent Other chartsand most significantly one in connexion with the founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around usshewed all the present continents well differentiated And in the latest discoverable specimendating perhaps from the Pliocene agethe approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia of North America with Europe through Greenland and of South America with the antarctic continent through Graham Land In the Carboniferous map the whole globeocean floor and rifted land mass alikebore symbols of the Old Ones vast stone cities but in the later charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain The final Pliocene specimen shewed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South America nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude Knowledge and interest in the northern world save for a study of coast-lines probably made during long exploration flights on those fan-like membraneous wings had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains the centrifugal rending of continents the seismic convulsions of land or sea-bottom and other natural causes was a matter of common record and it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general centre of the race built early in the Cretaceous age after a titanic earth-buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant It appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea-bottom In the new citymany of whose features we could recognise in the sculptures but which stretched fully an hundred miles along the mountain-range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of our arial surveythere were reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city which were thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of strata VIII Naturally Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we were Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance and on the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a house of very late date whose walls though somewhat damaged by a neighbouring rift contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyond the period of the Pliocene map whence we derived our last general glimpse of the pre-human world This was the last place we examined in detail since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective Certainly we were in one of the strangest weirdest and most terrible of all the corners of earths globe Of all existing lands it was infinitely the most ancient and the conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss The great mountain chain was tremendously longstarting as a low range at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire continent The really high part stretched in a mighty arc from about Latitude  E Longitude  to Latitude  E Longitude  with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that long ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the Antarctic Circle Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature seemed disturbingly close at hand I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas but the sculptures forbid me to say that they are earths highest That grim honour is beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and trepidation It seems that there was one part of the ancient landthe first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the Old Ones had seeped down from the starswhich had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil Cities built there had crumbled before their time and had been found suddenly deserted Then when the first great earth-buckling had convulsed the region in the Comanchian age a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaosand earth had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains If the scale of the carvings was correct these abhorred things must have been much over  feet highradically vaster than even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed They extended it appeared from about Latitude  E Longitude  to Latitude  E Longitude less than  miles away from the dead city so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not been for that vague opalescent haze Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long Antarctic Circle coast-line at Queen Mary Land Some of the Old Ones in the decadent days had made strange prayers to those mountains but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond No human eye had ever seen them and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the carvings I prayed that none ever might There are protecting hills along the coast beyond themQueen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Landsand I thank heaven no one has been able to land and climb those hills I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears as I used to be and I do not laugh now at the pre-human sculptors notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crests and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all through the long polar night There may be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange even if less namelessly accursed Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain-range became the seat of the principal temples and many carvings shewed what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts In the course of ages the caves had appeared and had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples With the advance of still later epochs all the limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by ground waters so that the mountains the foothills and the plains below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries Many graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground and of the final discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earths bowels This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains and which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones range and flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkess coast-line Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning till at last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry Much of the later city as we now found it had been built over that former bed The Old Ones understanding what had happened and exercising their always keen artistic sense had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the great stream began its descent into eternal darkness This river once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges was plainly the one whose extinct course we had seen in our aroplane survey Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the regions age-long aeon-dead history so that we were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient featuressquares important buildings and the likefor guidance in further explorations We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago for the sculptures told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like It must have had a marvellous and mystic beauty and as I thought of it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the citys inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit Yet according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror for there was a sombre and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some objectnever allowed to appear in the designfound in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through waving vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible westward mountains It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the citys desertion Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of the same age elsewhere even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period indeed very certain evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly afterward But this was the first and only set we directly encountered We meant to look farther later on but as I have said immediate conditions dictated another present objective There would though have been a limitfor after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished among the Old Ones there could not but have been a complete cessation of mural decoration The ultimate blow of course was the coming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall and which has never departed from the ill-fated polesthe great cold that at the worlds other extremity put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea Just when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to say in terms of exact years Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance of about  years from the present but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago and that the actual desertion of the city was complete long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene years agoas reckoned in terms of the earths whole surface In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones Heating devices were shewn in the houses and winter travellers were represented as muffled in protective fabrics Then we saw a series of cartouches the continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted in these late carvings depicting a constantly growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmthsome fleeing to cities under the sea off the far-away coast and some clambering down through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighbouring black abyss of subterrene waters In the end it seems to have been the neighbouring abyss which received the greatest colonisation This was partly due no doubt to the traditional sacredness of this especial region but may have been more conclusively determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains and for retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence and base of communication with various mines The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several gradings and improvements along the connecting routes including the chiselling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abysssharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew according to our most thoughtful estimates on the guide map we were compiling It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of where we were both being on the mountainward edge of the city one less than a quarter-mile toward the ancient river-course and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction The abyss it seems had shelving shores of dry land at certain places but the Old Ones built their new city under waterno doubt because of its greater certainty of uniform warmth The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been very great so that the earths internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period The beings seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-timeand eventually of course whole-timeresidence under water since they had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy There were many sculptures which shewed how they had always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere and how they had habitually bathed on the deep bottom of their great river The darkness of inner earth could likewise have been no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights Decadent though their style undoubtedly was these latest carvings had a truly epic quality where they told of the building of the new city in the cavern sea The Old Ones had gone about it scientifically quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains and employing expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform the construction according to the best methods These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the new ventureshoggoth-tissue from which to breed stone-lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city and other protoplasmic matter to mould into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea its architecture much like that of the city above and its workmanship displaying relatively little decadence because of the precise mathematical element inherent in building operations The newly bred shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelligence and were represented as taking and executing orders with marvellous quickness They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their voicesa sort of musical piping over a wide range if poor Lakes dissection had indicated arightand to work more from spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times They were however kept in admirable control The phosphorescent organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness and doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night Art and decoration were pursued though of course with a certain decadence The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city just as the emperor in a similar age of decline stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendours than its own people could create That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned By the time total abandonment did occurand it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advancedthe Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent artor had ceased to recognise the superior merit of the older carvings At any rate the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation though all the best separate statues like other moveables had been taken away The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were as I have said the latest we could find in our limited search They left us with a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognised for the sculptures shewed many signs of the colds malign encroachments Vegetation was declining and the terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer The saurian livestock were nearly all dead and the mammals were standing it none too well To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant shoggoths to land life a thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do The great river was now lifeless and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales All the birds had flown away save only the great grotesque penguins What had happened afterward we could only guess How long had the new sea-cavern city survived Was it still down there a stony corpse in eternal blackness Had the subterranean waters frozen at last To what fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice-cap Existing geology shews no trace of their presence Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north Could one be sure of what might or might not linger even to this day in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of earths deepest waters Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressureand men of the sea have fished up curious objects at times And has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses for their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early date in the land citys history They were according to their location certainly not less than thirty million years old and we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city and indeed the cavern itself had no existence They would have remembered an older scene with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere a younger land city of flourishing arts around them and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean And yet we could not help thinking about these specimensespecially about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lakes hideously ravaged camp There was something abnormal about that whole businessthe strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebodys madnessthose frightful gravesthe amount and nature of the missing materialGedneythe unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now shewed the race to have    Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible secrets of primal Nature IX I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change in our immediate objective This of course had to do with the chiselled avenues to the black inner world of whose existence we had not known before but which we were now eager to find and traverse From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighbouring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy sunless cliffs above the great abyss down whose side adequate paths improved by the Old Ones led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean To behold this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we knew of the thingyet we realised we must begin the quest at once if we expected to include it on our present flight It was now  PM and we had not enough battery replacements to let our torches burn on forever We had done so much of our studying and copying below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly continuous use and despite the special dry cell formula would obviously be good for only about four morethough by keeping one torch unused except for especially interesting or difficult places we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further mural deciphering Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photographycuriosity having long ago got the better of horrorbut just now we must hasten Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited and we were reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it but we did let one large notebook go If worst came to worst we could resort to rock-chippingand of course it would be possible even in case of really lost direction to work up to full daylight by one channel or another if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error So at last we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel According to the carvings from which we had made our map the desired tunnel-mouth could not be much more than a quarter-mile from where we stood the intervening space shewing solid-looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level The opening itself would be in the basementon the angle nearest the foothillsof a vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature which we tried to identify from our arial survey of the ruins No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight hence we concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged or that it had been totally shattered in an ice-rift we had noticed In the latter case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked so that we would have to try the next nearest onethe one less than a mile to the north The intervening river-course prevented our trying any of the more southerly tunnels on this trip and indeed if both of the neighbouring ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly oneabout a mile beyond our second choice As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compasstraversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation clambering up ramps crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down again encountering choked doorways and piles of debris hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches taking false leads and retracing our way in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left and once in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickled downwe were repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured walls along our route Many must have told tales of immense historical importance and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to the need of passing them by As it was we slowed down once in a while and turned on our second torch If we had had more films we would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs but time-consuming hand copying was clearly out of the question I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate or to hint rather than state is very strong It is necessary however to reveal the rest in order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnels mouthhaving crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall and descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanshipwhen about  PM Danforths keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual If we had had a dog with us I suppose we would have been warned before At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely Let me try to state the thing without flinching There was an odourand that odour was vaguely subtly and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now There were several conceivable explanations and we did a good deal of indecisive whispering Most important of all we did not retreat without further investigation for having come this far we were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster Anyway what we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe Such things did not happen in any normal world It was probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single torchtempted no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the oppressive wallsand which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris Danforths eyes as well as nose proved better than mine for it was likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level It did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion and when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked through it The irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite marks but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects Once we thought there was a hint of parallel tracks as if of runners This was what made us pause again It was during that pause that we caughtsimultaneously this timethe other odour ahead Paradoxically it was both a less frightful and a more frightful odourless frightful intrinsically but infinitely appalling in this place under the known circumstances    unless of course Gedney    For the odour was the plain and familiar one of common petrolevery-day gasoline Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this nighted burial-place of the aeons hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditionspresent or at least recentjust ahead Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosityor anxietyor auto-hypnotismor vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedneyor what notdrive us on Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley-turning in the ruins above and of the faint musical pipingpotentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lakes dissection report despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peakswhich he thought he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below I in my turn whispered of how the camp was leftof what had disappeared and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivablea wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown primal masonry But we could not convince each other or even ourselves of anything definite We had turned off all light as we stood still and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute Having automatically begun to move ahead we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off and the smell of gasoline grew stronger More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air Our tunnel quest was a blind one and we were not even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened The torch flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the blocked corridor in which we stood shewed several doorways in various states of obstruction and from one of them the gasoline odourquite submerging that other hint of odourcame with especial distinctness As we looked more steadily we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris from that particular opening Whatever the lurking horror might be we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion And yet when we did venture inside that black arch our first impression was one of anticlimax For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured crypta perfect cube with sides of about twenty feetthere remained no recent object of instantly discernible size so that we looked instinctively though in vain for a farther doorway In another moment however Danforths sharp vision had descried a place where the floor debris had been disturbed and we turned on both torches full strength Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied It was a rough levelling of the debris upon which several small objects lay carelessly scattered and at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odour even at this extreme super-plateau altitude In other words it could not be other than a sort of campa camp made by questing beings who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss Let me be plain The scattered objects were so far as substance was concerned all from Lakes camp and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place many spent matches three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton a broken fountain pen some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent-cloth a used electric battery with circular of directions a folder that came with our type of tent heater and a sprinkling of crumpled papers It was all bad enough but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish soapstones just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave-mounds might have been made and he might conceivably have prepared rough hasty sketchesvarying in their accuracy or lack of itwhich outlined the neighbouring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside our previous routea place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our arial surveyto the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel-mouth therein He might I repeat have prepared such sketches for those before us were quite obviously compiled as our own had been from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth though not from the ones which we had seen and used But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior despite haste and carelessness to any of the decadent carvings from which they were takenthe characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead citys heyday There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our lives after that since our conclusions were nownotwithstanding their wildnesscompletely fixed and of a nature I need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as this Perhaps we were madfor have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness But I think I can detect something of the same spiritalbeit in a less extreme formin the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits Half-paralysed with terror though we were there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end Of course we did not mean to face thator thosewhich we knew had been there but we felt that they must be gone by now They would by this time have found the other neighbouring entrance to the abyss and have passed within to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulfthe ultimate gulf they had never seen Or if that entrance too was blocked they would have gone on to the north seeking another They were we remembered partly independent of light Looking back to that moment I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions tookjust what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy We certainly did not mean to face what we fearedyet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage-point Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place shewn on the crumpled sketches we had found We had at once recognised it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture from above Something about the impressiveness of its rendering even in these hasty diagrams made us think that its sub-glacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures in which it figuredbeing indeed among the first things built in the city Its carvings if preserved could not but be highly significant Moreover it might form a good present link with the upper worlda shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing and probably that by which those others had descended At any rate the thing we did was to study the terrible sketcheswhich quite perfectly confirmed our ownand start back over the indicated course to the circular place the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed twice before us The other neighbouring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that I need not speak of our journeyduring which we continued to leave an economical trail of paperfor it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had reached the cul de sac except that it tended to adhere more closely to the ground level and even descend to basement corridors Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter under foot and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent we were again faintly consciousspasmodicallyof that more hideous and more persistent scent After the way had branched from our former course we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures which indeed seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones About  PM while traversing a vaulted corridor whose increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower as we advanced we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off our torch It appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place and that our distance from the upper air could not be very great The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins but we could see much through it even before we emerged Beyond there stretched a prodigious round spacefully  feet in diameterstrown with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we were about to cross The walls werein available spacesboldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions and displayed despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the spot an artistic splendour far beyond anything we had encountered before The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique Babylon Only the rapidity of our flight and the perspective which confounded the descent with the towers inner wall had prevented our noticing this feature from the air and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the sub-glacial level Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it in place but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed The thing was excellently preserved up to the present top of the towera highly remarkable circumstance in view of its exposureand its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls As we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight of this monstrous cylinder-bottomfifty million years old and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyeswe saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet This we recalled from our arial survey meant an outside glaciation of some forty feet since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled masonry somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference by the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins According to the sculptures the original tower had stood in the centre of an immense circular plaza and had been perhaps  or  feet high with tiers of horizontal discs near the top and a row of needle-like spires along the upper rim Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inwarda fortunate happening since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked As it was the ramp shewed sad battering whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently half-cleared It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which those others had descended and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere The towers mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered and any further sub-glacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general region Oddly we were still thinking about possible later tripseven after all we had seen and guessed Then as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor there came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the ramps lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened from our view There they werethe three sledges missing from Lakes campshaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped and contained things memorably familiar enoughthe gasoline stove fuel cans instrument cases provision tins tarpaulins obviously bulging with books and some bulging with less obvious contentseverything derived from Lakes equipment After what we had found in that other room we were in a measure prepared for this encounter The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens for there were two here both stiffly frozen perfectly preserved patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred and wrapped with patent care to prevent further damage They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog X Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our sombre discovery and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train of speculations We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousnessthe first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights Well known and mundane though they were their presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly have beensince they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which Lakes dissection report had led us to expect in those othersand which indeed our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind-howl we had heard since coming on the camp horrorit would have had a kind of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region around us A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs As it was however the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustmentsall our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life as the sterile disc of the moon What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response Instead it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarised by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here where such things ought not to be To be briefit was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin The muffled sound floated from sub-glacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence we had comeregions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel to the vast abyss The presence of a living water-bird in such a directionin a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform lifelessnesscould lead to only one conclusion hence our first thought was to verify the objective reality of the sound It was indeed repeated and seemed at times to come from more than one throat Seeking its source we entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared resuming our trail-blazingwith an added paper-supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledgeswhen we left daylight behind As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus we plainly discerned some curious dragging tracks and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose description would be only too superfluous The course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel-mouth and we were glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open The tunnel according to the chart ought to start from the basement of a large pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall from our arial survey as remarkably well preserved Along our path the single torch shewed a customary profusion of carvings but we did not pause to examine any of these Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us and we flashed on the second torch It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near Those other ones having left their supplies in the great circular place must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed This white waddling thing was fully six feet high yet we seemed to realise at once that it was not one of those others They were larger and dark and according to the sculptures their motion over land surfaces was a swift assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain We were indeed clutched for an instant by a primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones For it was only a penguinalbeit of a huge unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones sculptures and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stockundoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought was not for a moment to be doubted and this evidence of the gulfs continued warmth and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies We wondered too what had caused these three birds to venture out of their usual domain The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery whilst the manifest indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party of those others should have startled them Was it possible that those others had taken some aggressive action or tried to increase their meat supply We doubted whether that pungent odour which the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins since their ancestors had obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Onesan amicable relationship which must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained Regrettingin a flareup of the old spirit of pure sciencethat we could not photograph these anomalous creatures we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us and whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear Not long afterward a steep descent in a long low doorless and peculiarly sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel-mouth at last We had passed two more penguins and heard others immediately ahead Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarilya perfect inverted hemisphere obviously deep underground fully an hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high with low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one and that one yawning cavernously with a black arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet It was the entrance to the great abyss In this vast hemisphere whose concave roof was impressively though decadently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome a few albino penguins waddledaliens there but indifferent and unseeing The black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep descending grade its aperture adorned with grotesquely chiselled jambs and lintel From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a suspicion of vapour proceeded and we wondered what living entities other than penguins the limitless void below and the contiguous honeycombings of the land and the titan mountains might conceal We wondered too whether the trace of mountain-top smoke at first suspected by poor Lake as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned peak might not be caused by the tortuous-channelled rising of some such vapour from the unfathomed regions of earths core Entering the tunnel we saw that its outline wasat least at the startabout fifteen feet each way sides floor and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic masonry The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late decadent style and all the construction and carving were marvellously well preserved The floor was quite clear except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those others The farther one advanced the warmer it became so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments We wondered whether there were any actually igneous manifestations below and whether the waters of that sunless sea were hot After a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock though the tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved regularity Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our diagrams none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return and all of them welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back from the abyss The nameless scent of such things was very distinct Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspectindeed it was just such a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place We saw several penguins as we passed along and speculated on the distance we would have to traverse The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss but our previous wanderings had shewn us that matters of scale were not wholly to be depended on After about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed There was no visible vapour as at the mouth but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air The temperature was rapidly ascending and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us It was composed of furs and tent-cloth taken from Lakes camp and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been slashed Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the size and number of the side-galleries and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odourof what nature we could not guess though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterrene fungi Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had not prepared usa broadening and rising into a lofty natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor some  feet long and  broad and with many immense side-passages leading away into cryptical darkness Though this cavern was natural in appearance an inspection with both torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between adjacent honeycombings The walls were rough and the high vaulted roof was thick with stalactites but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off and was free from all debris detritus or even dust to a positively abnormal extent Except for the avenue through which we had come this was true of the floors of all the great galleries opening off from it and the singularity of the condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling The curious new foetor which had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively pungent here so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other Something about this whole place with its polished and almost glistening floor struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered The regularity of the passage immediately ahead as well as the larger proportion of penguin-droppings there prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave-mouths Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trail-blazing if any further complexity should develop for dust tracks of course could no longer be expected Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel wallsand stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage We realised of course the great decadence of the Old Ones sculpture at the time of the tunnelling and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us But now in this deeper section beyond the cavern there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanationa difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it This new and degenerate work was coarse bold and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface Danforth had the idea that it was a second carvinga sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones yet seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the techniquean alien element Danforth guessed that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution It was like yet disturbingly unlike what we had come to recognise as the Old Ones art and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used torch battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic designs Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study we resumed our advance after a cursory look though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if any further decorative changes developed Nothing of the sort was perceived though the carvings were in places rather sparse because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels We saw and heard fewer penguins but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth The new and inexplicable odour was abominably strong and we could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent Puffs of visible vapour ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature and the relative nearness of the sunless sea-cliffs of the great abyss Then quite unexpectedly we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor aheadobstructions which were quite definitely not penguinsand turned on our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary XI Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed I ought to be hardened by this stage but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror We saw as I have said certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead and I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification of the strange prevailing foetor now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone before us The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were and we dared approach them only because we could see even from a distance that they were quite as past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lakes camp They were indeed as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthedthough it grew plain from the thick dark-green pool gathering around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency There seemed to be only four of them whereas Lakes bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us To find them in this state was wholly unexpected and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark Penguins attacked in a body retaliate savagely with their beaks and our ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond Had those others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit The obstructions did not suggest it for penguin beaks against the tough tissues Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was beginning to make out Besides the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful Had there then been a struggle among those others and were the absent four responsible If so where were they Were they close at hand and likely to form an immediate menace to us We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly reluctant approach Whatever the conflict was it had clearly been that which had frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed wandering It must then have arisen near that faintly heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond since there were no signs that any birds had normally dwelt here Perhaps we reflected there had been a hideous running fight with the weaker party seeking to get back to the cached sledges when their pursuers finished them One could picture the daemoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and reluctantly Would to heaven we had never approached them at all but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had supersededrun back before we had seen what we did see and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects so that we soon realised the dominant factor in their incompleteness Mauled compressed twisted and ruptured as they were their chief common injury was total decapitation From each one the tentacled starfish-head had been removed and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large spreading pool but its stench was half overshadowed by that newer and stranger stench here more pungent than at any other point along our route Only when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions could we trace that second unexplainable foetor to any immediate sourceand the instant we did so Danforth remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones history in the Permian age  million years ago gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil palimpsest carvings I came only just short of echoing his cry myself for I had seen those primal sculptures too and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime-coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Onesthose whom the frightful shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war of re-subjugation They were infamous nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old bygone things for shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet and that only drugged dreamers had ever conceived them Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processesviscous agglutinations of bubbling cellsrubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductileslaves of suggestion builders of citiesmore and more sullen more and more intelligent more and more amphibious more and more imitativeGreat God What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things And now when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisageclung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly re-sculptured wall in a series of grouped dotswe understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths It was not fear of those four missing othersfor all too well did we suspect they would do no harm again Poor devils After all they were not evil things of their kind They were the men of another age and another order of being Nature had played a hellish jest on themas it will on any others that human madness callousness or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar wasteand this was their tragic homecoming They had not been even savagesfor what indeed had they done That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epochperhaps an attack by the furry frantically barking quadrupeds and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia    poor Lake poor Gedney    and poor Old Ones Scientists to the lastwhat had they done that we would not have done in their place God what intelligence and persistence What a facing of the incredible just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible Radiates vegetables monstrosities star-spawnwhatever they had been they were men They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed among the tree-ferns They had found their dead city brooding under its curse and had read its carven latter days as we had done They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seenand what had they found All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime on the wall beside themlooked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted penguin-fringed abyss whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforths hysterical scream The shock of recognising that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us into mute motionless statues and it is only through later conversations that we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment It seemed aeons that we stood there but actually it could not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds That hateful pallid mist curled forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulkand then came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking confused penguins over our former trail back to the city along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied automatic plunge for the sane outer air and light of day The new sound as I have intimated upset much that we had decided because it was what poor Lakes dissection had led us to attribute to those we had just judged dead It was Danforth later told me precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley-corner above the glacial level and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind-pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves At the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing too if only because of the surprising way Danforths impression chimed with mine Of course common reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic spectrally snowy birds of that malign regions core Tekeli-li Tekeli-li That I may admit is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mistthat insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered though we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so We had a vague hope however that non-aggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture if only from scientific curiosity After all if such an one had nothing to fear for itself it would have no motive in harming us Concealment being futile at this juncture we used our torch for a running glance behind and perceived that the mist was thinning Would we see at last a complete and living specimen of those others Again came that insidious musical pipingTekeli-li Tekeli-li Then noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer it occurred to us that the entity might be wounded We could take no chances however since it was very obviously approaching in answer to Danforths scream rather than in flight from any other entity The timing was too close to admit of doubt Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmarethat foetid unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through the burrows of the hillswe could form no guess and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old Oneperhaps a lone survivorto the peril of recapture and a nameless fate Thank heaven we did not slacken our run The curling mist had thickened again and was driving ahead with increased speed whilst the straying penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a panic really surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion when we had passed them Once more came that sinister wide-ranged pipingTekeli-li Tekeli-li We had been wrong The thing was not wounded but had merely paused on encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription above them We could never know what that daemon message wasbut those burials at Lakes camp had shewn how much importance the beings attached to their dead Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern where various ways converged and we were glad to be leaving those morbid palimpsest sculpturesalmost felt even when scarcely seenbehind Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries There were several of the blind albino penguins in the open space and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of travelling need keeping it strictly in front of us the frightened squawking motions of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls screen our true course and somehow set up a false lead Amidst the churning spiralling fog the littered and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond this point as differing from the other morbidly polished burrows could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature even so far as we could conjecture for those indicated special senses which made the Old Ones partly though imperfectly independent of light in emergencies In fact we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste For we had of course decided to keep straight on toward the dead city since the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be unthinkable The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one The penguins alone could not have saved us but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so Only a benign fate kept the curling vapours thick enough at the right moment for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish Indeed they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously re-sculptured tunnel into the cave so that we actually caught one first and only half-glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit If the fate which screened us was benign that which gave us the half-glimpse was infinitely the opposite for to that flash of semi-vision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses In the midst of our flight with all our faculties centred on the problem of escape we were in no condition to observe and analyse details yet even so our latent brain-cells must have wondered at the message brought them by our nostrils Afterward we realised what it wasthat our retreat from the foetid slime-coating on those headless obstructions and the coincident approach of the pursuing entity had not brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for In the neighbourhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable foetor had been wholly dominant but by this time it ought to have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those others This it had not donefor instead the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second So we glanced backsimultaneously it would appear though no doubt the incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other As we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth-centre ahead Unhappy act Not Orpheus himself or Lots wife paid much more dearly for a backward glance And again came that shocking wide-ranged pipingTekeli-li Tekeli-li I might as well be frankeven if I cannot bear to be quite directin stating what we saw though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city Instinct alone must have carried us throughperhaps better than reason could have done though if that was what saved us we paid a high price Of reason we certainly had little enough left Danforth was totally unstrung and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins reverberated through the vaultings ahead andthank Godthrough the now empty vaultings behind He could not have begun it at onceelse we would not have been alive and blindly racing I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought South Station UnderWashington UnderPark Street UnderKendallCentralHarvard    The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling It had only horror because I knew unerringly the monstrous nefandous analogy that had suggested it We had expected upon looking back to see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough but of that entity we had formed a clear idea What we did seefor the mists were indeed all too malignly thinnedwas something altogether different and immeasurably more hideous and detestable It was the utter objective embodiment of the fantastic novelists thing that should not be and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platformthe great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder But we were not on a station platform We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour It was a terrible indescribable thing vaster than any subway traina shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles faintly self-luminous and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter Still came that eldritch mocking cryTekeli-li Tekeli-li And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggothsgiven life thought and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressedhad likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters XII Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city yet these are purely dream-fragments involving no memory of volition details or physical exertion It was as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time causation or orientation The grey half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog They have a strange and titanic mausoleum and I hope the end of this planet will find them still undisturbed It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had produced but not even the fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the normal outer realm of sun and sky There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those buried epochs for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead races early and undecayed techniquea farewell from the Old Ones written fifty million years ago Finally scrambling out at the top we found ourselves on a great mound of tumbled blocks with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward and the brooding peaks of the great mountains shewing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours and the cold clutched at our vitals Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight we rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aroplane waited Of what had set us fleeing from the darkness of earths secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothillsthe probable ancient terraceby which we had descended and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead Half way uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing-spell and turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogean tangle of incredible stone shapes below usonce more outlined mystically against an unknown west As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness the restless ice-vapours having moved up to the zenith where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a dim elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dream-like against the beckoning rose-colour of the western sky Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow For a second we gasped in admiration of the scenes unearthly cosmic beauty and then vague horror began to creep into our souls For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden landhighest of earths peaks and focus of earths evil harbourers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning untrodden by any living thing of earth but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar nightbeyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng whereof unholy primal legends hint evasively We were the first human beings ever to see themand I hope to God we may be the last If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told truly these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than  miles away yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut above that remote and snowy rim like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens Their height then must have been tremendous beyond all known comparisoncarrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls Looking at them I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed slopesand wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawsons expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range Such thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the timeand Danforth seemed to be even worse Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast enough range whose re-crossing lay ahead of us From these foothills the black ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich and when we thought of the damnable honeycombs inside them and of the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave-mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range To make matters worse we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summitsas poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanismand thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped of that and of the blasphemous horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapours came All was well with the plane and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs Danforth got the engine started without trouble and we made a very smooth takeoff over the nightmare city Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw itso short yet infinitely long a time agoand we began rising and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass At a very high level there must have been great disturbance since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things but at  feet the height we needed for the pass we found navigation quite practicable As we drew close to the jutting peaks the winds strange piping again became manifest and I could see Danforths hands trembling at the controls Rank amateur though I was I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between pinnacles and when I made motions to change seats and take over his duties he did not protest I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the passresolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapour and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses men off the Sirens coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness But Danforth released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch could not keep quiet I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city ahead at the cave-riddled cube-barnacled peaks sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy rampart-strown foothills and upward at the seething grotesquely clouded sky It was then just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safelyyet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanelya horror which I feel sadly sure is mainly responsible for his present breakdown We had snatches of shouted conversation above the winds piping and the engines buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city Certain things we had agreed were not for people to know and discuss lightlyand I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition and others at any cost It is absolutely necessary for the peace and safety of mankind that some of earths dark dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage It was not he declares anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing vaporous wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed but a single fantastic daemoniac glimpse among the churning zenith-clouds of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through and of the actual though unrecognised mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lakes camp the day before but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about the black pit the carven rim the proto-shoggoths the windowless solids with five dimensions the nameless cylinder the elder pharos Yog-Sothoth the primal white jelly the colour out of space the wings the eyes in darkness the moon-ladder the original the eternal the undying and other bizarre conceptions but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years Danforth indeed is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library The higher sky as we crossed the range was surely vaporous and disturbed enough and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice-dust may have taken strange forms Imagination knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected refracted and magnified by such layers of restless cloud might easily have supplied the restand of course Danforth did not hint any of those specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word of all too obvious source Tekeli-li Tekeli-li 
  AzathothBy H P Lovecraft When age fell upon the world and wonder went out of the minds of men when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of springs flowering meads when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes when these things had come to pass and childish hopes had gone away forever there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the worlds dreams had fled Of the name and abode of this man but little is written for they were of the waking world only yet it is said that both were obscure It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair From that casement one might see only walls and windows except sometimes when one leaned far out and peered aloft at the small stars that passed And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects And one night a mighty gulf was bridged and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watchers window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold vortices of dust and fire swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond the worlds Opiate oceans poured there litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without even touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window and for days not counted in mens calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed the dreams that men have lost And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes 
  The Battle that Ended the CenturyMS Found in a Time MachineBy R H Barlowwith H P Lovecraft Note Barlows contributions are in brackets On the eve of the year  a vast crowd of interested spectators were present amidst the romantic ruins of Cohens Garage on the former site of New York to witness a fistic encounter between two renowned champions of the strange-story firmamentTwo-Gun Bob the Terror of the Plains and Knockout Bernie the Wild Wolf of West Shokan The Wolf was fresh from his correspondence course in physical training sold to him by Mr Arthur Leeds Before the battle the auguries were determined by the venerated Thibetan Lama Bill Lum Li who evoked the primal serpent-god of Valusia and found unmistakable signs of victory for both sides Cream-puffs were inattentively vended by Wladislaw Brenrykthe partakers being treated by the official surgeons Drs D H Killer and M Gin Brewery The gong was sounded at  oclock after which the air grew red with the gore of battle lavishly flung about by the mighty Texas slaughterer Very shortly the first actual damage occurredthe loosening of several teeth in both participants One bouncing out from the Wolfs mouth after a casual tap from Two-Gun described a parabola toward Yucatan being retrieved in a hasty expedition by Messrs A Hijacked Barrell and G A Scotland This incident was used by the eminent sociologist and ex-poet Frank Chimesleep Short Jr as the basis of a ballad of proletarian propaganda with three intentionally defective lines Meanwhile a potentate from a neighbouring kingdom the Effjay of Akkamin also known to himself as an amateur critic expressed his frenzied disgust at the technique of the combatants at the same time peddling photographs of the fighters with himself in the foreground at five cents each In round two the Shokan Soakers sturdy right crashed through the Texans ribs and became entangled in sundry viscera thereby enabling Two-Gun to get in several telling blows on his opponents unprotected chin Bob was greatly annoyed by the effeminate squeamishness shewn by several onlookers as muscles glands gore and bits of flesh were spattered over the ringside During this round the eminent magazine-cover anatomist Mrs M Blunderage portrayed the battlers as a pair of spirited nudes behind a thin veil of conveniently curling tobacco-smoke while the late Mr C Half-Cent provided a sketch of three Chinamen clad in silk hats and galoshesthis being his own original conception of the affray Among the amateur sketches made was one by Mr Goofy Hooey which later gained fame in the annual Cubist exhibit as Abstraction of an Eradicated Pudding In the third round the fight grew really rough several ears and other appurtenances being wholly or partially detached from the frontier battler by the Shokan Shocker Somewhat irritated Two-Gun countered with some exceptionally sharp blows severing many fragments from his aggressor who continued to fight with all his remaining members At this stage the audience gave signs of much nervous excitementinstances of trampling and goring being frequent The more enthusiastic members were placed in the custody of Mr Harry Brobst of the Butler Hospital for Mental Diseases The entire affair was reported by Mr W Lablache Talcum his copy being revised by Horse Power Hateart Throughout the event notes were taken by M le Comte dErlette for a -volume novel-cycle in the Proustian manner to be entitled Morning in September with illustrations by Mrs Blunderage Mr J Caesar Warts frequently interviewed both battlers and all the more important spectators obtaining as souvenirs after a spirited struggle with the Effjay an autographed quarter-rib of Two-Guns in an excellent state of preservation and three finger-nails from the Wild Wolf Lighting effects were supplied by the Electrical Testing Laboratories under the supervision of H Kanebrake The fourth round was prolonged eight hours at the request of the official artist Mr H Wanderer who wished to put certain shadings of fantasy into his representation of the Wolfs depleted physiognomy which included several supernumerary details supplied by the imagination The climax came in round five when the Texas Tearers left passed entirely through Battling Bernies face and brought both sluggers to the mat This was adjudged a finish by the refereeRobertieff Essovitch Karovsky the Muscovite Ambassadorwho in view of the Shokan Shockers gory state declared the latter to be essentially liquidated according to the Marxian ideology The Wild Wolf entered an official protest which was promptly overruled on the ground that all the points necessary to technical death were theoretically present The gonfalons sounded a fanfare of triumph for the victor while the technically vanquished was committed to the care of the official mortician Mr Teaberry Quince During the ceremonies the theoretical corpse strolled away for a bite of bologna but a tasteful cenotaph was supplied to furnish a focus for the rites The funeral procession was headed by a gaily bedecked hearse driven by Malik Taus the Peacock Sultan who sat on the box in West Point uniform and turban and steered an expert course over several formidable hedges and stone walls About half way to the cemetery the cortge was rejoined by the corpse who sat beside Sultan Malik on the box and finished his bologna sandwichhis ample girth having made it impossible to enter the hastily selected cenotaph An appropriate dirge was rendered by Maestro Sing Lee Bawledout on the piccolo Messrs De Silva Brown and Hendersons celebrated aria Never Swat a Fly from the old cantata Just Imagine being chosen for the occasion The only detail omitted from the funeral was the interment which was interrupted by the disconcerting news that the official gate-takerthe celebrated financier and publisher Ivar K Rodent Esqhad absconded with the entire proceeds This omission was regretted chiefly by the Rev D Vest Wind who was thereby forced to leave unspoken a long and moving sermon revised expressly for the celebration from a former discourse delivered at the burial of a favourite horse Mr Talcums report of the event illustrated by the well-known artist Klarkash-Ton who esoterically depicted the fighters as boneless fungi was printed after repeated rejections by the discriminating editor of the Windy City Grab-Bagas a broadside by W Peter Chef with typographical supervision by Vrest Orton This through the efforts of Otis Adelbert Kline was finally placed on sale in the bookshop of Smearum  Weep three and a half copies finally being disposed of through the alluring catalogue description supplied by Samuelus Philanthropus Esq In response to this wide demand the text was finally reprinted by Mr De Merit in the polychromatic pages of Wursts Weakly Americana under the title Has Science Been Outmoded or The Millers in the Garage No copies however remain in circulation since all which were not snapped up by fanatical bibliophiles were seized by the police in connexion with the libel suit of the Wild Wolf who was after several appeals ending with the World Court adjudged not only officially alive but the clear winner of the combat Glossary of NamesEd Two-Gun BobRobert E Howard Knockout Bernie the Wild Wolf of West ShokanBernard Austin Dwyer of West Shokan NY Bill Lum LiWilliam Lumley Wladislaw BrenrykH Warner Munn D H KillerDavid H Keller M Gin BreweryMiles G Breuer A Hijacked BarrellA Hyatt Verrill G A ScotlandGeorge Allan England Frank Chimesleep Short JrFrank Belknap Long Jr The Effjoy of AkkaminForrest J Ackerman Mrs M BlunderageMargaret Brundage artist for Weird Tales Mr C Half-CentC C Senf artist for Weird Tales Mr Goofy HooeyHugh Rankin artist for Weird Tales W Lablache TalcumWilfred Blanch Talman Horse Power HateartHoward Phillips Lovecraft M le Comte dErletteAugust Derleth author of Evening in Spring J Caesar WartsJulius Schwartz H KanebrakeH C Koenig employed by the Electrical Testing Laboratories H WandererHoward Wandrei Robertieff Essovitch KarovskyRobert S Carr Teaberry QuinceSeabury Quinn Malik Taus the Peacock SultanE Hoffmann Price Sing Lee BawledoutF Lee Baldwin Ivor K RodentHugo Gernsback Rev D Vest WindUnknown Klarkash-TonClark Ashton Smith Windy City Grab-BagWeird Tales W Peter ChefW Paul Cook Smearum  WeepDauber  Pine Samuelus PhilanthropusSamuel Loveman Mr De MeritA Merritt author of The Dwellers in the Mirage Wursts Weekly AmericanaHearsts American Weekly 
  The Beast in the CaveBy H P Lovecraft The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty I was lost completely hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recesses of the Mammoth Cave Turn as I might in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief Hope had departed Yet indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations I experienced none of these but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment If I must die I reflected then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford a conception which carried with it more of tranquility than of despair Starving would prove my ultimate fate of this I was certain Some I knew had gone mad under circumstances such as these but I felt that this end would not be mine My disaster was the result of no fault save my own since unbeknown to the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers and wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave had found myself unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my companions Already my torch had begun to expire soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth As I stood in the waning unsteady light I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives who taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world with its steady uniform temperature pure air and peaceful quiet had found instead death in strange and ghastly form I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made cottages as I passed them by with the party and had wondered what unnatural influence a long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy and as vigorous as I Now I grimly told myself my opportunity for settling this point had arrived provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a departure from this life As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity I resolved to leave no stone unturned no possible means of escape neglected so summoning all the powers possessed by my lungs I set up a series of loud shoutings in the vain hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour Yet as I called I believed in my heart that my cries were to no purpose and that my voice magnified and reflected by the numberless ramparts of the black maze about me fell upon no ears save my own All at once however my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I heard the sound of soft approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon Had then all my horrible apprehensions been for naught and was the guide having marked my unwarranted absence from the party following my course and seeking me out in this limestone labyrinth Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain I was on the point of renewing my cries in order that my discovery might come the sooner when in an instant my delight was turned to horror as I listened for my ever acute ear now sharpened in even greater degree by the complete silence of the cave bore to my benumbed understanding the unexpected and dreadful knowledge that these footfalls were not like those of any mortal man In the unearthly stillness of this subterranean region the tread of the booted guide would have sounded like a series of sharp and incisive blows These impacts were soft and stealthy as of the padded paws of some feline Besides at times when I listened carefully I seemed to trace the falls of four instead of two feet I was now convinced that I had by my cries aroused and attracted some wild beast perhaps a mountain lion which had accidentally strayed within the cave Perhaps I considered the Almighty had chosen for me a swifter and more merciful death than that of hunger Yet the instinct of self-preservation never wholly dormant was stirred in my breast and though escape from the oncoming peril might but spare me for a sterner and more lingering end I determined nevertheless to part with my life at as high a price as I could command Strange as it may seem my mind conceived of no intent on the part of the visitor save that of hostility Accordingly I became very quiet in the hope that the unknown beast would in the absence of a guiding sound lose its direction as had I and thus pass me by But this hope was not destined for realisation for the strange footfalls steadily advanced the animal evidently having obtained my scent which in an atmosphere so absolutely free from all distracting influences as is that of the cave could doubtless be followed at great distance Seeing therefore that I must be armed for defence against an uncanny and unseen attack in the dark I grouped about me the largest of the fragments of rock which were strown upon all parts of the floor of the cavern in the vicinity and grasping one in each hand for immediate use awaited with resignation the inevitable result Meanwhile the hideous pattering of the paws drew near Certainly the conduct of the creature was exceedingly strange Most of the time the tread seemed to be that of a quadruped walking with a singular lack of unison betwixt hind and fore feet yet at brief and infrequent intervals I fancied that but two feet were engaged in the process of locomotion I wondered what species of animal was to confront me it must I thought be some unfortunate beast who had paid for its curiosity to investigate one of the entrances of the fearful grotto with a lifelong confinement in its interminable recesses It doubtless obtained as food the eyeless fish bats and rats of the cave as well as some of the ordinary fish that are wafted in at every freshet of Green River which communicates in some occult manner with the waters of the cave I occupied my terrible vigil with grotesque conjectures of what alterations cave life might have wrought in the physical structure of the beast remembering the awful appearances ascribed by local tradition to the consumptives who had died after long residence in the cavern Then I remembered with a start that even should I succeed in killing my antagonist I should never behold its form as my torch had long since been extinct and I was entirely unprovided with matches The tension on my brain now became frightful My disordered fancy conjured up hideous and fearsome shapes from the sinister darkness that surrounded me and that actually seemed to press upon my body Nearer nearer the dreadful footfalls approached It seemed that I must give vent to a piercing scream yet had I been sufficiently irresolute to attempt such a thing my voice could scarce have responded I was petrified rooted to the spot I doubted if my right arm would allow me to hurl its missile at the oncoming thing when the crucial moment should arrive Now the steady pat pat of the steps was close at hand now very close I could hear the laboured breathing of the animal and terror-struck as I was I realised that it must have come from a considerable distance and was correspondingly fatigued Suddenly the spell broke My right hand guided by my ever trustworthy sense of hearing threw with full force the sharp-angled bit of limestone which it contained toward that point in the darkness from which emanated the breathing and pattering and wonderful to relate it nearly reached its goal for I heard the thing jump landing at a distance away where it seemed to pause Having readjusted my aim I discharged my second missile this time most effectively for with a flood of joy I listened as the creature fell in what sounded like a complete collapse and evidently remained prone and unmoving Almost overpowered by the great relief which rushed over me I reeled back against the wall The breathing continued in heavy gasping inhalations and expirations whence I realised that I had no more than wounded the creature And now all desire to examine the thing ceased At last something allied to groundless superstitious fear had entered my brain and I did not approach the body nor did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the extinction of its life Instead I ran at full speed in what was as nearly as I could estimate in my frenzied condition the direction from which I had come Suddenly I heard a sound or rather a regular succession of sounds In another instant they had resolved themselves into a series of sharp metallic clicks This time there was no doubt It was the guide And then I shouted yelled screamed even shrieked with joy as I beheld in the vaulted arches above the faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to be the reflected light of an approaching torch I ran to meet the flare and before I could completely understand what had occurred was lying upon the ground at the feet of the guide embracing his boots and gibbering despite my boasted reserve in a most meaningless and idiotic manner pouring out my terrible story and at the same time overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude At length I awoke to something like my normal consciousness The guide had noted my absence upon the arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave and had from his own intuitive sense of direction proceeded to make a thorough canvass of the by-passages just ahead of where he had last spoken to me locating my whereabouts after a quest of about four hours By the time he had related this to me I emboldened by his torch and his company began to reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a short distance back in the darkness and suggested that we ascertain by the rushlights aid what manner of creature was my victim Accordingly I retraced my steps this time with a courage born of companionship to the scene of my terrible experience Soon we descried a white object upon the floor an object whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself Cautiously advancing we gave vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment for of all the unnatural monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld this was in surpassing degree the strangest It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large proportions escaped perhaps from some itinerant menagerie Its hair was snow-white a thing due no doubt to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky confines of the cave but it was also surprisingly thin being indeed largely absent save on the head where it was of such length and abundance that it fell over the shoulders in considerable profusion The face was turned away from us as the creature lay almost directly upon it The inclination of the limbs was very singular explaining however the alternation in their use which I had before noted whereby the beast used sometimes all four and on other occasions but two for its progress From the tips of the fingers or toes long nail-like claws extended The hands or feet were not prehensile a fact that I ascribed to that long residence in the cave which as I before mentioned seemed evident from the all-pervading and almost unearthly whiteness so characteristic of the whole anatomy No tail seemed to be present The respiration had now grown very feeble and the guide had drawn his pistol with the evident intent of despatching the creature when a sudden sound emitted by the latter caused the weapon to fall unused The sound was of a nature difficult to describe It was not like the normal note of any known species of simian and I wondered if this unnatural quality were not the result of a long-continued and complete silence broken by the sensations produced by the advent of the light a thing which the beast could not have seen since its first entrance into the cave The sound which I might feebly attempt to classify as a kind of deep-toned chattering was faintly continued All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of the beast The paws went through a convulsive motion and the limbs contracted With a jerk the white body rolled over so that its face was turned in our direction For a moment I was so struck with horror at the eyes thus revealed that I noted nothing else They were black those eyes deep jetty black in hideous contrast to the snow-white hair and flesh Like those of other cave denizens they were deeply sunken in their orbits and were entirely destitute of iris As I looked more closely I saw that they were set in a face less prognathous than that of the average ape and infinitely more hairy The nose was quite distinct As we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision the thick lips opened and several sounds issued from them after which the thing relaxed in death The guide clutched my coat-sleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook fitfully casting weird moving shadows on the walls about us I made no motion but stood rigidly still my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor ahead Then fear left and wonder awe compassion and reverence succeeded in its place for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth The creature I had killed the strange beast of the unfathomed cave was or had at one time been a MAN 
  Beyond the Wall of SleepBy H P Lovecraft I have an exposition of sleep come upon me Shakespeare I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams and of the obscure world to which they belong Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiencesFreud to the contrary with his puerile symbolismthere are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier From my experience I cannot doubt but that man when lost to terrestrial consciousness is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much yet prove little We may guess that in dreams life matter and vitality as the earth knows such things are not necessarily constant and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon It was from a youthful reverie filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the winter of  when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an interne was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly His name as given on the records was Joe Slater or Slaader and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region one of those strange repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts Among these odd folk who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South law and morals are non-existent and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people Joe Slater who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen and who was described as a highly dangerous character certainly presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when first I beheld him Though well above the middle stature and of somewhat brawny frame he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip His age was unknown since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist but from the baldness of his head in front and from the decayed condition of his teeth the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case This man a vagabond hunter and trapper had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace Not that his form of language was at all unusual for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness that none might listen without apprehension He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said or at least all that had caused him to say what he did relapsing into a bovine half-amiable normality like that of the other hill-dwellers As Slater grew older it appeared his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in frequency and violence till about a month before his arrival at the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the authorities One day near noon after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous afternoon the man had roused himself most suddenly with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several neighbours to his cabina filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself Rushing out into the snow he had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air the while shouting his determination to reach some big big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor and the loud queer music far away As two men of moderate size sought to restrain him he had struggled with maniacal force and fury screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain thing that shines and shakes and laughs At length after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a sudden blow he had flung himself upon the other in a daemoniac ecstasy of bloodthirstiness shrieking fiendishly that he would jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that stopped him Family and neighbours had now fled in a panic and when the more courageous of them returned Slater was gone leaving behind an unrecognisable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an hour before None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him and it is likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold but when several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine they realised that he had somehow managed to survive and that his removal in one way or another would be necessary Then had followed an armed searching party whose purpose whatever it may have been originally became that of a sheriffs posse after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by accident observed then questioned and finally joined the seekers On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree and taken to the nearest gaol where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned To them he told a simple story He had he said gone to sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor He had awaked to find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin the mangled corpse of his neighbour Peter Slader at his feet Horrified he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his crime Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing nor could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact That night Slater slept quietly and the next morning he wakened with no singular feature save a certain alteration of expression Dr Barnard who had been watching the patient thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality and in the flaccid lips an all but imperceptible tightening as if of intelligent determination But when questioned Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer and only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day On the third morning occurred the first of the mans mental attacks After some show of uneasiness in sleep he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a strait-jacket The alienists listened with keen attention to his words since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbours Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes babbling in his backwoods dialect of great edifices of light oceans of space strange music and shadowy mountains and valleys But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him This vast vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible wrong and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire In order to reach it he said he would soar through abysses of emptiness burning every obstacle that stood in his way Thus ran his discourse until with the greatest suddenness he ceased The fire of madness died from his eyes and in dull wonder he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound Dr Barnard unbuckled the leathern harness and did not restore it till night when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his own volition for his own good The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly though he knew not why Within a week two more attacks appeared but from them the doctors learned little On the source of Slaters visions they speculated at length for since he could neither read nor write and had apparently never heard a legend or fairy tale his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable That it could not come from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner He raved of things he did not understand and could not interpret things which he claimed to have experienced but which he could not have learned through any normal or connected narration The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble dreams whose vividness could for a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man With due formality Slater was tried for murder acquitted on the ground of insanity and committed to the institution wherein I held so humble a post I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream life and from this you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case He seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me born no doubt of the interest I could not conceal and the gentle manner in which I questioned him Not that he ever recognised me during his attacks when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic word-pictures but he knew me in his quiet hours when he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could never enjoy again His family never called to see him probably it had found another temporary head after the manner of decadent mountain folk By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike but his glowing titanic visions though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive How I often asked myself could the stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension something infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific colleagues And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man The sum of all my investigation was that in a kind of semi-uncorporeal dream life Slater wandered or floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys meadows gardens cities and palaces of light in a region unbounded and unknown to man That there he was no peasant or degenerate but a creature of importance and vivid life moving proudly and dominantly and checked only by a certain deadly enemy who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure and who did not appear to be of human shape since Slater never referred to it as a man or as aught save a thing This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong which the maniac if maniac he were yearned to avenge From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings I judged that he and the luminous thing had met on equal terms that in his dream existence the man was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy This impression was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all that impeded his progress Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words wholly inadequate to convey them a circumstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a true dream-world indeed existed oral language was not its medium for the transmission of thought Could it be that the dream-soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dulness could not utter Could it be that I was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I could but learn to discover and read them I did not tell the older physicians of these things for middle age is sceptical cynical and disinclined to accept new ideas Besides the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his paternal way that I was overworking that my mind needed a rest It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular motion convertible into ether waves of radiant energy like heat light and electricity This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude pre-radio period These I had tested with a fellow-student but achieving no result had soon packed them away with other scientific odds and ends for possible future use Now in my intense desire to probe into the dream life of Joe Slater I sought these instruments again and spent several days in repairing them for action When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial At each outburst of Slaters violence I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy I had but little notion of how the thought-impressions would if successfully conveyed arouse an intelligent response in my brain but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them Accordingly I continued my experiments though informing no one of their nature It was on the twenty-first of February  that the thing finally occurred As I look back across the years I realise how unreal it seems and sometimes half wonder if old Dr Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination I recall that he listened with great kindness and patience when I told him but afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arranged for the half-years vacation on which I departed the next week That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed for despite the excellent care he had received Joe Slater was unmistakably dying Perhaps it was his mountain freedom that he missed or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique but at all events the flame of vitality flickered low in the decadent body He was drowsy near the end and as darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep I did not strap on the strait-jacket as was customary when he slept since I saw that he was too feeble to be dangerous even if he woke in mental disorder once more before passing away But I did place upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic radio hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream-world in the brief time remaining In the cell with us was one nurse a mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus or think to inquire into my course As the hours wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly in sleep but I did not disturb him I myself lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the healthy and the dying man must have nodded a little later The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me Chords vibrations and harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous spectacle of ultimate beauty Walls columns and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in air extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendour Blending with this display of palatial magnificence or rather supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation were glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys high mountains and inviting grottoes covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eye could conceive of yet formed wholly of some glowing ethereal plastic entity which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter As I gazed I perceived that my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses for each vista which appeared to me was the one my changing mind most wished to behold Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger for each sight and sound was familiar to me just as it had been for uncounted aeons of eternity before and would be for like eternities to come Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me soul to soul with silent and perfect interchange of thought The hour was one of approaching triumph for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage escaping forever and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres We floated thus for a little time when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us as though some force were recalling me to earthwhere I least wished to go The form near me seemed to feel a change also for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion and itself prepared to quit the scene fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the other objects A few more thoughts were exchanged and I knew that the luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage though for my brother of light it would be the last time The sorry planet-shell being well-nigh spent in less than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly Joe Slater was indeed awaking though probably for the last time As I looked more closely I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of colour which had never before been present The lips too seemed unusual being tightly compressed as if by the force of a stronger character than had been Slaters The whole face finally began to grow tense and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes I did not arouse the sleeping nurse but readjusted the slightly disarranged head-bands of my telepathic radio intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver All at once the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open causing me to stare in blank amazement at what I beheld The man who had been Joe Slater the Catskill decadent was now gazing at me with a pair of luminous expanded eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened Neither mania nor degeneracy was visible in that gaze and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high order At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind and though no actual language was employed my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English Joe Slater is dead came the soul-petrifying voice or agency from beyond the wall of sleep My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing and the countenance was still intelligently animated He is better dead for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life He was too much of an animal too little a man yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet He has been my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep I am your brother of light and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages Next year I may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan which is to come three thousand years hence You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter How little does the earth-self know of life and its extent How little indeed ought it to know for its own tranquillity Of the oppressor I cannot speak You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presenceyou who without knowing idly gave to its blinking beacon the name of Algol the Daemon-Star It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for aeons held back by bodily encumbrances Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance Watch me in the sky close by the Daemon-Star I cannot speak longer for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid and the coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish You have been my friend in the cosmos you have been my only friend on this planetthe only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch We shall meet againperhaps in the shining mists of Orions Sword perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia Perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight perhaps in some other form an aeon hence when the solar system shall have been swept away At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased and the pale eyes of the dreameror can I say dead mancommenced to glaze fishily In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch and felt of his wrist but found it cold stiff and pulseless The sallow cheeks paled again and the thick lips fell open disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater I shivered pulled a blanket over the hideous face and awakened the nurse Then I left the cell and went silently to my room I had an insistent and unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember The climax What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect I have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts allowing you to construe them as you will As I have already admitted my superior old Dr Fenton denies the reality of everything I have related He vows that I was broken down with nervous strain and badly in need of the long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me He assures me on his professional honour that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac whose fantastic notions must have come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulate in even the most decadent of communities All this he tells meyet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died Lest you think me a biassed witness anothers pen must add this final testimony which may perhaps supply the climax you expect I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority Prof Garrett P Serviss On February   a marvellous new star was discovered by Dr Anderson of Edinburgh not very far from Algol No star had been visible at that point before Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella In a week or two it had visibly faded and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye 
  The BookBy H P Lovecraft My memories are very confused There is even much doubt as to where they begin for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me while at other times it seems as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey formless infinity I am not even certain how I am communicating this message While I know I am speaking I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard My identity too is bewilderingly cloudy I seem to have suffered a great shockperhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique incredible experience These cycles of experience of course all stem from that worm-riddled book I remember when I found itin a dimly lighted place near the black oily river where the mists always swirl That place was very old and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves There were besides great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing I never learned its title for the early pages were missing but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling There was a formulaa sort of list of things to say and dowhich I recognised as something black and forbidden something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universes guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb It was a keya guideto certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it but this book was very old indeed No printing-press but the hand of some half-crazed monk had traced these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity I remember how the old man leered and tittered and made a curious sign with his hand when I bore it away He had refused to take pay for it and only long afterward did I guess why As I hurried home through those narrow winding mist-choked waterfront streets I had a frightful impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet The centuried tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignityas if some hitherto closed channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened I felt that those walls and overhanging gables of mildewed brick and fungous plaster and timberwith fishy eye-like diamond-paned windows that leeredcould hardly desist from advancing and crushing me    yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away I remember how I read the book at lastwhite-faced and locked in the attic room that I had long devoted to strange searchings The great house was very still for I had not gone up till after midnight I think I had a family thenthough the details are very uncertainand I know there were many servants Just what the year was I cannot say for since then I have known many ages and dimensions and have had all my notions of time dissolved and refashioned It was by the light of candles that I readI recall the relentless dripping of the waxand there were chimes that came every now and then from distant belfries I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness as if I feared to hear some very remote intruding note among them Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high above the other roofs of the city It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow and never again can he be alone I had evokedand the book was indeed all I had suspected That night I passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision and when morning found me in the attic room I saw in the walls and shelves and fittings that which I had never seen before Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it Mixed with the present scene was always a little of the past and a little of the future and every once-familiar object loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened sight From then on I walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and half-known shapes and with each new gateway crossed the less plainly could I recognise the things of the narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound What I saw about me none else saw and I grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought mad Dogs had a fear of me for they felt the outside shadow which never left my side But still I read morein hidden forgotten books and scrolls to which my new vision led meand pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and life-patterns toward the core of the unknown cosmos I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor and stood in the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from Tartary had brought The walls melted away and I was swept by a black wind through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needle-like pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me After a while there was utter blackness and then the light of myriad stars forming strange alien constellations Finally I saw a green-litten plain far below me and discerned on it the twisted towers of a city built in no fashion I had ever known or read of or dreamed of As I floated closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in an open space and felt a hideous fear clutching at me I screamed and struggled and after a blankness was again in my attic room sprawled flat over the five phosphorescent circles on the floor In that nights wandering there was no more of strangeness than in many a former nights wandering but there was more of terror because I knew I was closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before Thereafter I was more cautious with my incantations for I had no wish to be cut off from my body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never return 
  The Call of CthulhuBy H P Lovecraft Found Among the Papers of the LateFrancis Wayland Thurston of Boston Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival    a survival of a hugely remote period when    consciousness was manifested perhaps in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity    forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods monsters mythical beings of all sorts and kinds    Algernon Blackwood IThe 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 survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it That glimpse like all dread glimpses of truth flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated thingsin 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  with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University Providence Rhode Island Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many Locally interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat falling suddenly as witnesses said after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceaseds 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 wonderand more than wonder As my grand-uncles 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 shewing 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 mans 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 to 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 Angells most recent hand and made no pretence 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 The manuscript was divided into two sections the first of which was headed Dream and Dream Work of H A Wilcox  Thomas St Providence RI and the second Narrative of Inspector John R Legrasse  Bienville St New Orleans La at  A A S MtgNotes on Same  Prof Webbs 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-Elliots 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 Frazers Golden Bough and Miss Murrays Witch-Cult in Western Europe The cuttings largely alluded to outr mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of  The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale It appears that on March st  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 recognised 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 professors manuscript the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his hosts 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 shewed some sharpness in replying for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology Young Wilcoxs 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 earthquake tremor the night before the most considerable felt in New England for some years and Wilcoxs imagination 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 night-clothes when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him My uncle blamed his old age Wilcox afterward said for his slowness in recognising 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 as gibberish The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters Cthulhu and Rlyeh On March d 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 youths 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 mans subsidence into lethargy His temperature oddly enough was not greatly above normal but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder On April nd at about  pm every trace of Wilcoxs malady suddenly ceased He sat upright in bed astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of March nd 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 thoughtso 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 businessNew Englands traditional salt of the earthgave an almost completely negative result though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there always between March d and April ndthe period of young Wilcoxs delirium Scientific men were little more affected though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes As it was lacking their original letters I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed had been imposing on the veteran scientist These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale From February th to April nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptors delirium Over a fourth of those who reported anything reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last One case which the note describes with emphasis was very sad The subject a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism went violently insane on the date of young Wilcoxs 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 professors 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 despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some glorious fulfilment which never arrives whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti and African outposts report ominous mutterings American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March  The west of Ireland too is full of wild rumour and legendry and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Paris spring salon of  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 IIThe Tale of Inspector Legrasse The older matters which had made the sculptors dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript Once before it appears Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as Cthulhu and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data The earlier experience had come in  seventeen years before when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St Louis Professor Angell as befitted one of his authority and attainments had had a prominent part in all the deliberations and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution The chief of these outsiders and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source His name was John Raymond Legrasse and he was by profession an Inspector of Police With him he bore the subject of his visit a grotesque repulsive and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology On the contrary his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations The statuette idol fetish or whatever it was had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles Of its origin apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members absolutely nothing was to be discovered hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help 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 recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone The figure which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study was between seven and eight inches in height and of exquisitely artistic workmanship It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers a scaly rubbery-looking body prodigious claws on hind and fore feet and long narrow wings behind This thing which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy was of a somewhat bloated corpulence and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block the seat occupied the centre whilst the long curved claws of the doubled-up crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal The cephalopod head was bent forward so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the crouchers elevated knees The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown Its vast awesome and incalculable age was unmistakable yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisations youthor 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 worlds 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 Inspectors problem there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew This person was the late William Channing Webb Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University and an explorer of no slight note Professor Webb had been engaged forty-eight years before in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion a curious form of devil-worship chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little and which they mentioned only with shudders saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or 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 so far as he could tell it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting This data received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members proved doubly exciting to Inspector 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 Esquimaux 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 Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like thisthe word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud Phnglui mglwnafh Cthulhu Rlyeh wgahnagl 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 Rlyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming And now in response to a general and urgent demand Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance It savoured of the wildest dreams of 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 November st  there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south The squatters there mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafittes 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 fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create At length the squatter settlement a miserable huddle of huts hove in sight and hysterical dwellers ran out 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 toward 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 polypous 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 DIberville 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 Legrasses men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward 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 daemoniac 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 organised ululation would cease and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual Phnglui mglwnafh Cthulhu Rlyeh wgahnagl 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 hypnotised with horror In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acres 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 ring-shaped 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 with 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 Bacchanal 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 a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest treesbut 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 mulattoes 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 fetichism was involved Degraded and ignorant as they were the creatures held with surprising 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 Those 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 men 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 Rlyeh 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 secretthat was never spoken aloud only whispered The chant meant only this In his house at Rlyeh 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 men 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 shapefor did not this star-fashioned image prove itbut 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 Rlyeh 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 but 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 fleshly minds of mammals Then whispered Castro those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them idols brought in dim aeras 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 Rlyeh 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 Legrasses 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 publications 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 latters 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 Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans Professor Angells 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 uncles 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 some time be heard from as one of the great decadents for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies 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 shewed 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 insensibly 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 uncles 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 stonewhose geometry he oddly said was all wrongand 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 Cthulhus dream-vigil in his stone vault at Rlyeh 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 connexions 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 almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell One thing I began to suspect and which I now fear I know is that my uncles 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 sculptors data have come to sinister ears I think Professor Angell 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 IIIThe 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 the Sydney Bulletin for April   It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncles research I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the Cthulhu Cult and was visiting a learned friend in 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 wide 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 Experience Odd Idol Found in His Possession Inquiry to Follow The Morrison Cos 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 N Z which was sighted April th in S Latitude   W Longitude   with one living and one dead man aboard The Vigilant left Valparaiso March th and on April nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves On April th 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 February th with a complement of eleven men The Emma he says was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March st and on March nd in S Latitude   W Longitude   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 yachts equipment The Emmas men shewed 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 yachts 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 the Emmas 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 April nd From that time till his rescue on the th the man remembers little and he does not even recall when William Briden his companion died Bridens 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 March st 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 Emmas crew had died and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive What had the vice-admiraltys 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 March stour February th according to the International Date Linethe 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 March d 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 monsters malign pursuit whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium And what of this storm of April ndthe date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever What of all thisand 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 mans 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 siege of mankinds 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 at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove but gained nothing from its non-committal 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 Legrasses 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 rembarked at once for the Norwegian capital and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg Johansens 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 Christiana 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 survived his return said his wife for the doings at sea in  had broken him He had told her no more than he had told the public but had left a long manuscriptof technical matters as he saidwritten 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 connexion with her husbands 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 thinga naive sailors effort at a post-facto diaryand 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 shew why the sound of the water against the vessels 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 Johansens voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty The Emma in ballast had cleared Auckland on February th and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled mens dreams Once more under control the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March nd and I could feel the mates 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 shews 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 Johansens command the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea and in S Latitude   W Longitude   come upon a coast-line of mingled mud ooze and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earths supreme terrorthe nightmare corpse-city of Rlyeh 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 of 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 mates 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 broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfacessurfaces too great to belong to any thing 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 polarising 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 shewed concavity after the first shewed 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 searchedvainly as it provedfor 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 phantasmally 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 mouldingthat is one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontaland 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 phantasy 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 membraneous 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 Johansens 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 describedthere 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 design 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 ngstrom 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 shouldnt 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 wheel and engines to get the Alert under way Slowly amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene she began to churn 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 shrilly as he kept on 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 daemon 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 whereGod in heaventhe 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 April nd 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 comets 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 mocking imps of Tartarus Out of that dream came rescuethe 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 tellthey 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 minethis 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 I shall 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 comebut 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 Case of Charles Dexter WardBy H P Lovecraft The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust a Philosopher may without any criminal Necromancy call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated BORELLUS I A Result and a Prologue From a private hospital for the insane near Providence Rhode Island there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case since it presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character In the first place the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant Mental disturbance it is true will age one rapidly but the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire In the second place his organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry the voice was lost so that no sounds above a whisper were possible digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded either normal or pathological The skin had a morbid chill and dryness and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before In general all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent Psychologically too Charles Ward was unique His madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms Dr Willett who was Wards family physician affirms that the patients gross mental capacity as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity had actually increased since the seizure Ward it is true was always a scholar and an antiquarian but even his most brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists It was indeed a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital so powerful and lucid did the youths mind seem and only on the evidence of others and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his intelligence was he finally placed in confinement To the very moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted and shrewd observers failing to foresee his escape freely predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody Only Dr Willett who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth of body and mind ever since seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom He had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues Willett indeed presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case He was the last to see the patient before his flight and emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Wards escape became known three hours later That escape itself is one of the unsolved wonders of Dr Waites hospital A window open above a sheer drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it yet after that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably gone Willett himself has no public explanations to offer though he seems strangely easier in mind than before the escape Many indeed feel that he would like to say more if he thought any considerable number would believe him He had found Ward in his room but shortly after his departure the attendants knocked in vain When they opened the door the patient was not there and all they found was the open window with a chill April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them True the dogs howled some time before but that was while Willett was still present and they had caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on Wards father was told at once over the telephone but he seemed more saddened than surprised By the time Dr Waite called in person Dr Willett had been talking with him and both disavowed any knowledge or complicity in the escape Only from certain closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained and even these are too wildly fantastic for general credence The one fact which remains is that up to the present time no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy no doubt gaining his taste from the venerable town around him and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of his parents old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill With the years his devotion to ancient things increased so that history genealogy and the study of colonial architecture furniture and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from his sphere of interests These tastes are important to remember in considering his madness for although they do not form its absolute nucleus they play a prominent part in its superficial form The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all related to modern matters and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit questioning so that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to a former age through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested in the antiquities he knew so well He had it appears lost his regard for them through sheer familiarity and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain That this wholesale deletion had occurred he did his best to hide but it was clear to all who watched him that his whole programme of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to have been his by virtue of his birth in  and his education in the schools of our own time Alienists are now wondering how in view of his vitally impaired range of data the escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today the dominant opinion being that he is lying low in some humble and unexacting position till his stock of modern information can be brought up to the normal The beginning of Wards madness is a matter of dispute among alienists Dr Lyman the eminent Boston authority places it in  or  during the boys last year at the Moses Brown School when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult and refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual researches of much greater importance to make This is certainly borne out by Wards altered habits at the time especially by his continual search through town records and among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in  the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen some of whose papers he professed to have found behind the panelling of a very old house in Olney Court on Stampers Hill which Curwen was known to have built and occupied It is broadly speaking undeniable that the winter of  saw a great change in Ward whereby he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at home and abroad varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefathers grave From this opinion however Dr Willett substantially dissents basing his verdict on his close and continuous knowledge of the patient and on certain frightful investigations and discoveries which he made toward the last Those investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him so that his voice trembles when he tells them and his hand trembles when he tries to write of them Willett admits that the change of  would ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence which culminated in the horrible and uncanny alienation of  but believes from personal observation that a finer distinction must be made Granting freely that the boy was always ill-balanced temperamentally and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his responses to phenomena around him he refuses to concede that the early alteration marked the actual passage from sanity to madness crediting instead Wards own statement that he had discovered or rediscovered something whose effect on human thought was likely to be marvellous and profound The true madness he is certain came with a later change after the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed after a trip to strange foreign places had been made and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and secret circumstances after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly indicated and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable conditions after the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip and after the patients memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his voice failed and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently noticed It was only about this time Willett points out with much acuteness that the nightmare qualities became indubitably linked with Ward and the doctor feels shudderingly sure that enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youths claim regarding his crucial discovery In the first place two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwens ancient papers found Secondly the boy once shewed Dr Willett those papers and a page of the Curwen diary and each of the documents had every appearance of genuineness The hole where Ward claimed to have found them was long a visible reality and Willett had a very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings which can scarcely be believed and can never perhaps be proved Then there were the mysteries and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters and the problem of the Curwen penmanship and of what the detectives brought to light about Dr Allen these things and the terrible message in mediaeval minuscules found in Willetts pocket when he gained consciousness after his shocking experience And most conclusive of all there are the two hideous results which the doctor obtained from a certain pair of formulae during his final investigations results which virtually proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge  One must look back at Charles Wards earlier life as at something belonging as much to the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly In the autumn of  and with a considerable show of zest in the military training of the period he had begun his junior year at the Moses Brown School which lies very near his home The old main building erected in  had always charmed his youthful antiquarian sense and the spacious park in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for landscape His social activities were few and his hours were spent mainly at home in rambling walks in his classes and drills and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall the State House the Public Library the Athenaeum the Historical Society the John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University and the newly opened Shepley Library in Benefit Street One may picture him yet as he was in those days tall slim and blond with studious eyes and a slight stoop dressed somewhat carelessly and giving a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness His walks were always adventures in antiquity during which he managed to recapture from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the centuries before His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous hill that rises just east of the river and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he could look dizzily out over all the clustered spires domes roofs and skyscraper summits of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond Here he was born and from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled him in his carriage past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years before that the town had long ago overtaken and on toward the stately colleges along the shady sumptuous street whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their generous yards and gardens He had been wheeled too along sleepy Congdon Street one tier lower down on the steep hill and with all its eastern homes on high terraces The small wooden houses averaged a greater age here for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed and in these rides he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen and one of the childs first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment all violet and mystic against a fevered apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive silhouette its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky When he was larger his famous walks began first with his impatiently dragged nurse and then alone in dreamy meditation Farther and farther down that almost perpendicular hill he would venture each time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city He would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner where before him was a wooden antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of Georgian grandeur It was getting to be a slum here but the titan elms cast a restoring shadow over the place and the boy used to stroll south past the long lines of the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals On the eastern side they were set high over basements with railed double flights of stone steps and the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new and red heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming so visible Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above down to the old Town Street that the founders had laid out at the rivers edge in  Here ran innumerable little lanes with leaning huddled houses of immense antiquity and fascinated though he was it was long before he dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn out a dream or a gateway to unknown terrors He found it much less formidable to continue along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St Johns hidden churchyard and the rear of the  Colony House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington stopped At Meeting Streetthe successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other periodshe would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the highway had to resort in climbing the slope and downward to the west glimpsing the old brick colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient Sign of Shakespears Head where the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was printed before the Revolution Then came the exquisite First Baptist Church of  luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple and the Georgian roofs and cupolas hovering by Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became better flowering at last into a marvellous group of early mansions but still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked old waterfront recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot vice and squalor rotting wharves and blear-eyed ship-chandleries with such surviving alley names as Packet Bullion Gold Silver Coin Doubloon Sovereign Guilder Dollar Dime and Cent Sometimes as he grew taller and more adventurous young Ward would venture down into this maelstrom of tottering houses broken transoms tumbling steps twisted balustrades swarthy faces and nameless odours winding from South Main to South Water searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers still touched and returning northward at this lower level past the steep-roofed  warehouses and the broad square at the Great Bridge where the  Market House still stands firm on its ancient arches In that square he would pause to drink in the bewildering beauty of the old town as it rises on its eastward bluff decked with its two Georgian spires and crowned by the vast new Christian Science dome as London is crowned by St Pauls He liked mostly to reach this point in the late afternoon when the slanting sunlight touches the Market House and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold and throws magic around the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poets love for the sight and then he would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up the narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams would begin to peep out in small-paned windows and through fanlights set high over double flights of steps with curious wrought-iron railings At other times and in later years he would seek for vivid contrasts spending half a walk in the crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home where the hill drops to the lower eminence of Stampers Hill with its ghetto and negro quarter clustering round the place where the Boston stage coach used to start before the Revolution and the other half in the gracious southerly realm about George Benevolent Power and Williams Streets where the old slope holds unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in which so many fragrant memories linger These rambles together with the diligent studies which accompanied them certainly account for a large amount of the antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern world from Charles Wards mind and illustrate the mental soil upon which fell in that fateful winter of  the seeds that came to such strange and terrible fruition Dr Willett is certain that up to this ill-omened winter of first change Charles Wards antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid Graveyards held for him no particular attraction beyond their quaintness and historic value and of anything like violence or savage instinct he was utterly devoid Then by insidious degrees there appeared to develop a curious sequel to one of his genealogical triumphs of the year before when he had discovered among his maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen who had come from Salem in March of  and about whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered Wards great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in  married a certain Ann Tillinghast daughter of Mrs Eliza daughter to Capt James Tillinghast of whose paternity the family had preserved no trace Late in  whilst examining a volume of original town records in manuscript the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a legal change of name by which in  a Mrs Eliza Curwen widow of Joseph Curwen resumed along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann her maiden name of Tillinghast on the ground that her Husbands name was become a publick Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after his Decease the which confirming an antient common Rumour tho not to be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past Doubting This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of two leaves which had been carefully pasted together and treated as one by a laboured revision of the page numbers It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hitherto unknown great-great-great-grandfather The discovery doubly excited him because he had already heard vague reports and seen scattered allusions relating to this person about whom there remained so few publicly available records aside from those becoming public only in modern times that it almost seemed as if a conspiracy had existed to blot him from memory What did appear moreover was of such a singular and provocative nature that one could not fail to imagine curiously what it was that the colonial recorders were so anxious to conceal and forget or to suspect that the deletion had reasons all too valid Before this Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph Curwen remain in the idle stage but having discovered his own relationship to this apparently hushed-up character he proceeded to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever he might find concerning him In this excited quest he eventually succeeded beyond his highest expectations for old letters diaries and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere yielded many illuminating passages which their writers had not thought it worth their while to destroy One important sidelight came from a point as remote as New York where some Rhode Island colonial correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces Tavern The really crucial thing though and what in Dr Willetts opinion formed the definite source of Wards undoing was the matter found in August  behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court It was that beyond a doubt which opened up those black vistas whose end was deeper than the pit II An Antecedent and a Horror Joseph Curwen as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what Ward heard and unearthed was a very astonishing enigmatic and obscurely horrible individual He had fled from Salem to Providencethat universal haven of the odd the free and the dissentingat the beginning of the great witchcraft panic being in fear of accusation because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or alchemical experiments He was a colourless-looking man of about thirty and was soon found qualified to become a freeman of Providence thereafter buying a home lot just north of Gregory Dexters at about the foot of Olney Street His house was built on Stampers Hill west of the Town Street in what later became Olney Court and in  he replaced this with a larger one on the same site which is still standing Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem to grow much older than he had been on his arrival He engaged in shipping enterprises purchased wharfage near Mile-End Cove helped rebuild the Great Bridge in  and in  was one of the founders of the Congregational Church on the hill but always did he retain the nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five As decades mounted up this singular quality began to excite wide notice but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy forefathers and practiced a simplicity of living which did not wear him out How such simplicity could be reconciled with the inexplicable comings and goings of the secretive merchant and with the queer gleaming of his windows at all hours of night was not very clear to the townsfolk and they were prone to assign other reasons for his continued youth and longevity It was held for the most part that Curwens incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to do with his condition Gossip spoke of the strange substances he brought from London and the Indies on his ships or purchased in Newport Boston and New York and when old Dr Jabez Bowen came from Rehoboth and opened his apothecary shop across the Great Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar there was ceaseless talk of the drugs acids and metals that the taciturn recluse incessantly bought or ordered from him Acting on the assumption that Curwen possessed a wondrous and secret medical skill many sufferers of various sorts applied to him for aid but though he appeared to encourage their belief in a non-committal way and always gave them odd-coloured potions in response to their requests it was observed that his ministrations to others seldom proved of benefit At length when over fifty years had passed since the strangers advent and without producing more than five years apparent change in his face and physique the people began to whisper more darkly and to meet more than half way that desire for isolation which he had always shewn Private letters and diaries of the period reveal too a multitude of other reasons why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at feared and finally shunned like a plague His passion for graveyards in which he was glimpsed at all hours and under all conditions was notorious though no one had witnessed any deed on his part which could actually be termed ghoulish On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm at which he generally lived during the summer and to which he would frequently be seen riding at various odd times of the day or night Here his only visible servants farmers and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged Narragansett Indians the husband dumb and curiously scarred and the wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance probably due to a mixture of negro blood In the lean-to of this house was the laboratory where most of the chemical experiments were conducted Curious porters and teamers who delivered bottles bags or boxes at the small rear door would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks crucibles alembics and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room and prophesied in whispers that the close-mouthed chymistby which they meant alchemistwould not be long in finding the Philosophers Stone The nearest neighbours to this farmthe Fenners a quarter of a mile awayhad still queerer things to tell of certain sounds which they insisted came from the Curwen place in the night There were cries they said and sustained howlings and they did not like the large number of livestock which thronged the pastures for no such amount was needed to keep a lone old man and a very few servants in meat milk and wool The identity of the stock seemed to change from week to week as new droves were purchased from the Kingstown farmers Then too there was something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with only high narrow slits for windows Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwens town house in Olney Court not so much the fine new one built in  when the man must have been nearly a century old but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless attic and shingled sides whose timbers he took the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition Here there was less mystery it is true but the hours at which lights were seen the secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised the only menservants the hideous indistinct mumbling of the incredibly aged French housekeeper the large amounts of food seen to enter a door within which only four persons lived and the quality of certain voices often heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable times all combined with what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the place a bad name In choicer circles too the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed for as the newcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading life of the town he had naturally made acquaintances of the better sort whose company and conversation he was well fitted by education to enjoy His birth was known to be good since the Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introduction in New England It developed that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very early life living for a time in England and making at least two voyages to the Orient and his speech when he deigned to use it was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman But for some reason or other Curwen did not care for society Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor he always reared such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic sardonic arrogance as if he had come to find all human beings dull through having moved among stranger and more potent entities When Dr Checkley the famous wit came from Boston in  to be rector of Kings Church he did not neglect calling on one of whom he soon heard so much but left in a very short while because of some sinister undercurrent he detected in his hosts discourse Charles Ward told his father when they discussed Curwen one winter evening that he would give much to learn what the mysterious old man had said to the sprightly cleric but that all diarists agree concerning Dr Checkleys reluctance to repeat anything he had heard The good man had been hideously shocked and could never recall Joseph Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed More definite however was the reason why another man of taste and breeding avoided the haughty hermit In  Mr John Merritt an elderly English gentleman of literary and scientific leanings came from Newport to the town which was so rapidly overtaking it in standing and built a fine country seat on the Neck in what is now the heart of the best residence section He lived in considerable style and comfort keeping the first coach and liveried servants in town and taking great pride in his telescope his microscope and his well-chosen library of English and Latin books Hearing of Curwen as the owner of the best library in Providence Mr Merritt early paid him a call and was more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been His admiration for his hosts ample shelves which besides the Greek Latin and English classics were equipped with a remarkable battery of philosophical mathematical and scientific works including Paracelsus Agricola Van Helmont Sylvius Glauber Boyle Boerhaave Becher and Stahl led Curwen to suggest a visit to the farmhouse and laboratory whither he had never invited anyone before and the two drove out at once in Mr Merritts coach Mr Merritt always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at the farmhouse but maintained that the titles of the books in the special library of thaumaturgical alchemical and theological subjects which Curwen kept in a front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a lasting loathing Perhaps however the facial expression of the owner in exhibiting them contributed much of the prejudice The bizarre collection besides a host of standard works which Mr Merritt was not too alarmed to envy embraced nearly all the cabbalists daemonologists and magicians known to man and was a treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnards edition the Turba Philosophorum Gebers Liber Investigationis and Artephius Key of Wisdom all were there with the cabbalistic Zohar Peter Jammys set of Albertus Magnus Raymond Lullys Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetzners edition Roger Bacons Thesaurus Chemicus Fludds Clavis Alchimiae and Trithemius De Lapide Philosophico crowding them close Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion and Mr Merritt turned pale when upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay But oddly enough the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by a mere minor detail On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward a badly worn copy of Borellus bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in Curwens hand The book was open at about its middle and one paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of mystic black-letter that the visitor could not resist scanning it through Whether it was the nature of the passage underscored or the feverish heaviness of the strokes which formed the underscoring he could not tell but something in that combination affected him very badly and very peculiarly He recalled it to the end of his days writing it down from memory in his diary and once trying to recite it to his close friend Dr Checkley till he saw how greatly it disturbed the urbane rector It read The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust a Philosopher may without any criminal Necromancy call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street however that the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen Sailors are superstitious folk and the seasoned salts who manned the infinite rum slave and molasses sloops the rakish privateers and the great brigs of the Browns Crawfords and Tillinghasts all made strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the slim deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and supercargoes on the long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly Curwens own clerks and captains hated and feared him and all his sailors were mongrel riff-raff from Martinique St Eustatius Havana or Port Royal It was in a way the frequency with which these sailors were replaced which inspired the acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which the old man was held A crew would be turned loose in the town on shore leave some of its members perhaps charged with this errand or that and when reassembled it would be almost sure to lack one or more men That many of the errands had concerned the farm on the Pawtuxet Road and that few of the sailors had ever been seen to return from that place was not forgotten so that in time it became exceedingly difficult for Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands Almost invariably several would desert soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence wharves and their replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great problem to the merchant In  Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast suspected of vague horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be named understood or even proved to exist The last straw may have come from the affair of the missing soldiers in  for in March and April of that year two Royal regiments on their way to New France were quartered in Providence and depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with the red-coated strangers and as several of them began to be missed people thought of the odd conditions among his own seamen What would have happened if the regiments had not been ordered on no one can tell Meanwhile the merchants worldly affairs were prospering He had a virtual monopoly of the towns trade in saltpetre black pepper and cinnamon and easily led any other one shipping establishment save the Browns in his importation of brassware indigo cotton woollens salt rigging iron paper and English goods of every kind Such shopkeepers as James Green at the Sign of the Elephant in Cheapside the Russells at the Sign of the Golden Eagle across the Bridge or Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near the New Coffee-House depended almost wholly upon him for their stock and his arrangements with the local distillers the Narragansett dairymen and horse-breeders and the Newport candle-makers made him one of the prime exporters of the Colony Ostracised though he was he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort When the Colony House burned down he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick onestill standing at the head of its parade in the old main streetwas built in  In that same year too he helped rebuild the Great Bridge after the October gale He replaced many of the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire and bought heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted Town Street their pavement of great round stones with a brick footwalk or causey in the middle About this time also he built the plain but excellent new house whose doorway is still such a triumph of carving When the Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr Cottons hill church in  and founded Deacon Snows church across the Bridge Curwen had gone with them though his zeal and attendance soon abated Now however he cultivated piety once more as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown him into isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharply checked  The sight of this strange pallid man hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less than a full century old seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation too vague to pin down or analyse was at once a pathetic a dramatic and a contemptible thing Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures however that there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed toward him especially after the rapid disappearances of his sailors abruptly ceased He must likewise have begun to practice an extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions for he was never again caught at such wanderings whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and manoeuvres at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion His rate of food consumption and cattle replacement remained abnormally high but not until modern times when Charles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library did it occur to any personsave one embittered youth perhapsto make dark comparisons between the large number of Guinea blacks he imported until  and the disturbingly small number for whom he could produce bona fide bills of sale either to slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to the planters of the Narragansett Country Certainly the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred character were uncannily profound once the necessity for their exercise had become impressed upon him But of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight Curwen continued to be avoided and distrusted as indeed the one fact of his continued air of youth at a great age would have been enough to warrant and he could see that in the end his fortunes would be likely to suffer His elaborate studies and experiments whatever they may have been apparently required a heavy income for their maintenance and since a change of environment would deprive him of the trading advantages he had gained it would not have profited him to begin anew in a different region just then Judgment demanded that he patch up his relations with the townsfolk of Providence so that his presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation transparent excuses of errands elsewhere and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness His clerks being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no one else would employ were giving him much worry and he held to his sea-captains and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of ascendancy over thema mortgage a promissory note or a bit of information very pertinent to their welfare In many cases diarists have recorded with some awe Curwen shewed almost the power of a wizard in unearthing family secrets for questionable use During the final five years of his life it seemed as though only direct talks with the long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the data which he had so glibly at his tongues end About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain his footing in the community Hitherto a complete hermit he now determined to contract an advantageous marriage securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position would make all ostracism of his home impossible It may be that he also had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance reasons so far outside the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half after his death caused anyone to suspect them but of this nothing certain can ever be learned Naturally he was aware of the horror and indignation with which any ordinary courtship of his would be received hence he looked about for some likely candidate upon whose parents he might exert a suitable pressure Such candidates he found were not at all easy to discover since he had very particular requirements in the way of beauty accomplishments and social security At length his survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best and oldest ship-captains a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named Dutee Tillinghast whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress Capt Tillinghast was completely under the domination of Curwen and consented after a terrible interview in his cupolaed house on Powers Lane hill to sanction the blasphemous alliance Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age and had been reared as gently as the reduced circumstances of her father permitted She had attended Stephen Jacksons school opposite the Court-House Parade and had been diligently instructed by her mother before the latters death of smallpox in  in all the arts and refinements of domestic life A sampler of hers worked in  at the age of nine may still be found in the rooms of the Rhode Island Historical Society After her mothers death she had kept the house aided only by one old black woman Her arguments with her father concerning the proposed Curwen marriage must have been painful indeed but of these we have no record Certain it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden second mate of the Crawford packet Enterprise was dutifully broken off and that her union with Joseph Curwen took place on the seventh of March  in the Baptist church in the presence of one of the most distinguished assemblages which the town could boast the ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor The Gazette mentioned the event very briefly and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be cut or torn out Ward found a single intact copy after much search in the archives of a private collector of note observing with amusement the meaningless urbanity of the language Monday evening last Mr Joseph Curwen of this Town Merchant was married to Miss Eliza Tillinghast Daughter of Capt Dutee Tillinghast a young Lady who has real Merit added to a beautiful Person to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its Felicity The collection of Durfee-Arnold letters discovered by Charles Ward shortly before his first reputed madness in the private collection of Melville F Peters Esq of George St and covering this and a somewhat antecedent period throws vivid light on the outrage done to public sentiment by this ill-assorted match The social influence of the Tillinghasts however was not to be denied and once more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by persons whom he could never otherwise have induced to cross his threshold His acceptance was by no means complete and his bride was socially the sufferer through her forced venture but at all events the wall of utter ostracism was somewhat worn down In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonished both her and the community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration The new house in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations and although Curwen was much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never visited he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any other time in his long years of residence Only one person remained in open enmity with him this being the youthful ships officer whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance and though of a quiet and ordinarily mild disposition was now gaining a hate-bred dogged purpose which boded no good to the usurping husband On the seventh of May  Curwens only child Ann was born and was christened by the Rev John Graves of Kings Church of which both husband and wife had become communicants shortly after their marriage in order to compromise between their respective Congregational and Baptist affiliations The record of this birth as well as that of the marriage two years before was stricken from most copies of the church and town annals where it ought to appear and Charles Ward located both with the greatest difficulty after his discovery of the widows change of name had apprised him of his own relationship and engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his madness The birth entry indeed was found very curiously through correspondence with the heirs of the loyalist Dr Graves who had taken with him a duplicate set of records when he left his pastorate at the outbreak of the Revolution Ward had tried this source because he knew that his great-great-grandmother Ann Tillinghast Potter had been an Episcopalian Shortly after the birth of his daughter an event he seemed to welcome with a fervour greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness Curwen resolved to sit for a portrait This he had painted by a very gifted Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander then a resident of Newport and since famous as the early teacher of Gilbert Stuart The likeness was said to have been executed on a wall-panel of the library of the house in Olney Court but neither of the two old diaries mentioning it gave any hint of its ultimate disposition At this period the erratic scholar shewed signs of unusual abstraction and spent as much time as he possibly could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road He seemed it was stated in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense as if expecting some phenomenal thing or on the brink of some strange discovery Chemistry or alchemy would appear to have played a great part for he took from his house to the farm the greater number of his volumes on that subject His affectation of civic interest did not diminish and he lost no opportunities for helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins Joseph Brown and Benjamin West in their efforts to raise the cultural tone of the town which was then much below the level of Newport in its patronage of the liberal arts He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his bookshop in  and was thereafter his best customer extending aid likewise to the struggling Gazette that appeared each Wednesday at the Sign of Shakespears Head In politics he ardently supported Governor Hopkins against the Ward party whose prime strength was in Newport and his really eloquent speech at Hackers Hall in  against the setting off of North Providence as a separate town with a pro-Ward vote in the General Assembly did more than any other one thing to wear down the prejudice against him But Ezra Weeden who watched him closely sneered cynically at all this outward activity and freely swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffick with the blackest gulfs of Tartarus The revengeful youth began a systematic study of the man and his doings whenever he was in port spending hours at night by the wharves with a dory in readiness when he saw lights in the Curwen warehouses and following the small boat which would sometimes steal quietly off and down the bay He also kept as close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm and was once severely bitten by the dogs the old Indian couple loosed upon him  In  came the final change in Joseph Curwen It was very sudden and gained wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk for the air of suspense and expectancy dropped like an old cloak giving instant place to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph Curwen seemed to have difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what he had found or learned or made but apparently the need of secrecy was greater than the longing to share his rejoicing for no explanation was ever offered by him It was after this transition which appears to have come early in July that the sinister scholar began to astonish people by his possession of information which only their long-dead ancestors would seem to be able to impart But Curwens feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this change On the contrary they tended rather to increase so that more and more of his shipping business was handled by the captains whom he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcy had been He altogether abandoned the slave trade alleging that its profits were constantly decreasing Every possible moment was spent at the Pawtuxet farm though there were rumours now and then of his presence in places which though not actually near graveyards were yet so situated in relation to graveyards that thoughtful people wondered just how thorough the old merchants change of habits really was Ezra Weeden though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief and intermittent on account of his sea voyaging had a vindictive persistence which the bulk of the practical townsfolk and farmers lacked and subjected Curwens affairs to a scrutiny such as they had never had before Many of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchants vessels had been taken for granted on account of the unrest of the times when every colonist seemed determined to resist the provisions of the Sugar Act which hampered a prominent traffick Smuggling and evasion were the rule in Narragansett Bay and nocturnal landings of illicit cargoes were continuous commonplaces But Weeden night after night following the lighters or small sloops which he saw steal off from the Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks soon felt assured that it was not merely His Majestys armed ships which the sinister skulker was anxious to avoid Prior to the change in  these boats had for the most part contained chained negroes who were carried down and across the bay and landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet being afterward driven up the bluff and across country to the Curwen farm where they were locked in that enormous stone outbuilding which had only high narrow slits for windows After that change however the whole programme was altered Importation of slaves ceased at once and for a time Curwen abandoned his midnight sailings Then about the spring of  a new policy appeared Once more the lighters grew wont to put out from the black silent docks and this time they would go down the bay some distance perhaps as far as Namquit Point where they would meet and receive cargo from strange ships of considerable size and widely varied appearance Curwens sailors would then deposit this cargo at the usual point on the shore and transport it overland to the farm locking it in the same cryptical stone building which had formerly received the negroes The cargo consisted almost wholly of boxes and cases of which a large proportion were oblong and heavy and disturbingly suggestive of coffins Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity visiting it each night for long periods and seldom letting a week go by without a sight except when the ground bore a footprint-revealing snow Even then he would often walk as close as possible in the travelled road or on the ice of the neighbouring river to see what tracks others might have left Finding his own vigils interrupted by nautical duties he hired a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to continue the survey during his absences and between them the two could have set in motion some extraordinary rumours That they did not do so was only because they knew the effect of publicity would be to warn their quarry and make further progress impossible Instead they wished to learn something definite before taking any action What they did learn must have been startling indeed and Charles Ward spoke many times to his parents of his regret at Weedens later burning of his notebooks All that can be told of their discoveries is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in a none too coherent diary and what other diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated from the statements which they finally madeand according to which the farm was only the outer shell of some vast and revolting menace of a scope and depth too profound and intangible for more than shadowy comprehension It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a great series of tunnels and catacombs inhabited by a very sizeable staff of persons besides the old Indian and his wife underlay the farm The house was an old peaked relic of the middle seventeenth century with enormous stack chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the north where the roof came nearly to the ground This building stood clear of any other yet judging by the different voices heard at odd times within it must have been accessible through secret passages beneath These voices before  were mere mumblings and negro whisperings and frenzied screams coupled with curious chants or invocations After that date however they assumed a very singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull acquiescence and explosions of frantic pain or fury rumblings of conversation and whines of entreaty pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest They appeared to be in different languages all known to Curwen whose rasping accents were frequently distinguishable in reply reproof or threatening Sometimes it seemed that several persons must be in the house Curwen certain captives and the guards of those captives There were voices of a sort that neither Weeden nor Smith had ever heard before despite their wide knowledge of foreign parts and many that they did seem to place as belonging to this or that nationality The nature of the conversations seemed always a kind of catechism as if Curwen were extorting some sort of information from terrified or rebellious prisoners Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook for English French and Spanish which he knew were frequently used but of these nothing has survived He did however say that besides a few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families were concerned most of the questions and answers he could understand were historical or scientific occasionally pertaining to very remote places and ages Once for example an alternately raging and sullen figure was questioned in French about the Black Princes massacre at Limoges in  as if there were some hidden reason which he ought to know Curwen asked the prisonerif prisoner it werewhether the order to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat found on the altar in the ancient Roman crypt beneath the Cathedral or whether the Dark Man of the Haute Vienne Coven had spoken the Three Words Failing to obtain replies the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means for there was a terrific shriek followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound None of these colloquies were ever ocularly witnessed since the windows were always heavily draped Once though during a discourse in an unknown tongue a shadow was seen on the curtain which startled Weeden exceedingly reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had seen in the autumn of  in Hackers Hall when a man from Germantown Pennsylvania had given a clever mechanical spectacle advertised as a View of the Famous City of Jerusalem in which are represented Jerusalem the Temple of Solomon his Royal Throne the noted Towers and Hills likewise the Sufferings of Our Saviour from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the Hill of Golgotha an artful piece of Statuary Worthy to be seen by the Curious It was on this occasion that the listener who had crept close to the window of the front room whence the speaking proceeded gave a start which roused the old Indian pair and caused them to loose the dogs on him After that no more conversations were ever heard in the house and Weeden and Smith concluded that Curwen had transferred his field of action to regions below That such regions in truth existed seemed amply clear from many things Faint cries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be the solid earth in places far from any structure whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear where the high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet there was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy masonry which was obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill When or how these catacombs could have been constructed Weeden was unable to say but he frequently pointed out how easily the place might have been reached by bands of unseen workmen from the river Joseph Curwen put his mongrel seamen to diverse uses indeed During the heavy spring rains of  the two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any subterrene secrets might be washed to light and were rewarded by the sight of a profusion of both human and animal bones in places where deep gullies had been worn in the banks Naturally there might be many explanations of such things in the rear of a stock farm and in a locality where old Indian burying-grounds were common but Weeden and Smith drew their own inferences It was in January  whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly on what if anything to think or do about the whole bewildering business that the incident of the Fortaleza occurred Exasperated by the burning of the revenue sloop Liberty at Newport during the previous summer the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an increased vigilance concerning strange vessels and on this occasion His Majestys armed schooner Cygnet under Capt Charles Leslie captured after a short pursuit one early morning the snow Fortaleza of Barcelona Spain under Capt Manuel Arruda bound according to its log from Grand Cairo Egypt to Providence When searched for contraband material this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its cargo consisted exclusively of Egyptian mummies consigned to Sailor A B C who would come to remove his goods in a lighter just off Namquit Point and whose identity Capt Arruda felt himself in honour bound not to reveal The Vice-Admiralty Court at Newport at a loss what to do in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the one hand and of the unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand compromised on Collector Robinsons recommendation by freeing the ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Island waters There were later rumours of its having been seen in Boston Harbour though it never openly entered the Port of Boston This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence and there were not many who doubted the existence of some connexion between the cargo of mummies and the sinister Joseph Curwen His exotic studies and his curious chemical importations being common knowledge and his fondness for graveyards being common suspicion it did not take much imagination to link him with a freakish importation which could not conceivably have been destined for anyone else in the town As if conscious of this natural belief Curwen took care to speak casually on several occasions of the chemical value of the balsams found in mummies thinking perhaps that he might make the affair seem less unnatural yet stopping just short of admitting his participation Weeden and Smith of course felt no doubt whatsoever of the significance of the thing and indulged in the wildest theories concerning Curwen and his monstrous labours The following spring like that of the year before had heavy rains and the watchers kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen farm Large sections were washed away and a certain number of bones discovered but no glimpse was afforded of any actual subterranean chambers or burrows Something was rumoured however at the village of Pawtuxet about a mile below where the river flows in falls over a rocky terrace to join the placid landlocked cove There where quaint old cottages climbed the hill from the rustic bridge and fishing-smacks lay anchored at their sleepy docks a vague report went round of things that were floating down the river and flashing into sight for a minute as they went over the falls Of course the Pawtuxet is a long river which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards and of course the spring rains had been very heavy but the fisherfolk about the bridge did not like the wild way that one of the things stared as it shot down to the still water below or the way that another half cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of objects which normally cry out That rumour sent Smithfor Weeden was just then at seain haste to the river-bank behind the farm where surely enough there remained the evidences of an extensive cave-in There was however no trace of a passage into the steep bank for the miniature avalanche had left behind a solid wall of mixed earth and shrubbery from aloft Smith went to the extent of some experimental digging but was deterred by lack of successor perhaps by fear of possible success It is interesting to speculate on what the persistent and revengeful Weeden would have done had he been ashore at the time  By the autumn of  Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell others of his discoveries for he had a large number of facts to link together and a second eye-witness to refute the possible charge that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his fancy As his first confidant he selected Capt James Mathewson of the Enterprise who on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his veracity and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in the town to be heard in turn with respect The colloquy took place in an upper room of Sabins Tavern near the docks with Smith present to corroborate virtually every statement and it could be seen that Capt Mathewson was tremendously impressed Like nearly everyone else in the town he had had black suspicions of his own anent Joseph Curwen hence it needed only this confirmation and enlargement of data to convince him absolutely At the end of the conference he was very grave and enjoined strict silence upon the two younger men He would he said transmit the information separately to some ten or so of the most learned and prominent citizens of Providence ascertaining their views and following whatever advice they might have to offer Secrecy would probably be essential in any case for this was no matter that the town constables or militia could cope with and above all else the excitable crowd must be kept in ignorance lest there be enacted in these already troublous times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century before which had first brought Curwen hither The right persons to tell he believed would be Dr Benjamin West whose pamphlet on the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker Rev James Manning President of the College which had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily housed in the new King Street schoolhouse awaiting the completion of its building on the hill above Presbyterian-Lane ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins who had been a member of the Philosophical Society at Newport and was a man of very broad perceptions John Carter publisher of the Gazette all four of the Brown brothers John Joseph Nicholas and Moses who formed the recognised local magnates and of whom Joseph was an amateur scientist of parts old Dr Jabez Bowen whose erudition was considerable and who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwens odd purchases and Capt Abraham Whipple a privateersman of phenomenal boldness and energy who could be counted on to lead in any active measures needed These men if favourable might eventually be brought together for collective deliberation and with them would rest the responsibility of deciding whether or not to inform the Governor of the Colony Joseph Wanton of Newport before taking action The mission of Capt Mathewson prospered beyond his highest expectations for whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants somewhat sceptical of the possible ghastly side of Weedens tale there was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort of secret and cordinated action Curwen it was clear formed a vague potential menace to the welfare of the town and Colony and must be eliminated at any cost Late in December  a group of eminent townsmen met at the home of Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures Weedens notes which he had given to Capt Mathewson were carefully read and he and Smith were summoned to give testimony anent details Something very like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over though there ran through that fear a grim determination which Capt Whipples bluff and resonant profanity best expressed They would not notify the Governor because a more than legal course seemed necessary With hidden powers of uncertain extent apparently at his disposal Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town Nameless reprisals might ensue and even if the sinister creature complied the removal would be no more than the shifting of an unclean burden to another place The times were lawless and men who had flouted the Kings revenue forces for years were not the ones to balk at sterner things when duty impelled Curwen must be surprised at his Pawtuxet farm by a large raiding-party of seasoned privateersmen and given one decisive chance to explain himself If he proved a madman amusing himself with shrieks and imaginary conversations in different voices he would be properly confined If something graver appeared and if the underground horrors indeed turned out to be real he and all with him must die It could be done quietly and even the widow and her father need not be told how it came about While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the town an incident so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little else was mentioned for miles around In the middle of a moonlight January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the river and up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window and people around Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared space in front of the Turks Head There was a baying of dogs in the distance but this subsided as soon as the clamour of the awakened town became audible Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out to see what was happening but nothing rewarded their search The next morning however a giant muscular body stark naked was found on the jams of ice around the southern piers of the Great Bridge where the Long Dock stretched out beside Abbotts distil-house and the identity of this object became a theme for endless speculation and whispering It was not so much the younger as the older folk who whispered for only in the patriarchs did that rigid face with horror-bulging eyes strike any chord of memory They shaking as they did so exchanged furtive murmurs of wonder and fear for in those stiff hideous features lay a resemblance so marvellous as to be almost an identityand that identity was with a man who had died full fifty years before Ezra Weeden was present at the finding and remembering the baying of the night before set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy Dock Bridge whence the sound had come He had a curious expectancy and was not surprised when reaching the edge of the settled district where the street merged into the Pawtuxet Road he came upon some very curious tracks in the snow The naked giant had been pursued by dogs and many booted men and the returning tracks of the hounds and their masters could be easily traced They had given up the chase upon coming too near the town Weeden smiled grimly and as a perfunctory detail traced the footprints back to their source It was the Pawtuxet farm of Joseph Curwen as he well knew it would be and he would have given much had the yard been less confusingly trampled As it was he dared not seem too interested in full daylight Dr Bowen to whom Weeden went at once with his report performed an autopsy on the strange corpse and discovered peculiarities which baffled him utterly The digestive tracts of the huge man seemed never to have been in use whilst the whole skin had a coarse loosely knit texture impossible to account for Impressed by what the old men whispered of this bodys likeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel Green whose great-grandson Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in Curwens employ Weeden asked casual questions till he found where Green was buried That night a party of ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrendens Lane and opened a grave They found it vacant precisely as they had expected Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept Joseph Curwens mail and shortly before the incident of the naked body there was found a letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the coperating citizens think deeply Parts of it copied and preserved in the private archives of the Smith family where Charles Ward found it ran as follows I delight that you continue in ye Gettg at Olde Matters in your Way and doe not think better was done at Mr Hutchinsons in Salem-Village Certainely there was Nothg butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H raisd upp from What he coud gather onlie a part of What you sente did not Worke whether because of Any Thing missg or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speakg or yr Copyg I alone am at a Loss I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus and owne my Self confounded by ye VII Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende But I woud have you Observe what was tolde to us aboute takg Care whom to calle up for you are Sensible what Mr Mather writ in ye Magnalia of  and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported I say to you againe doe not call up Any that you can not put downe by the Which I meane Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use Ask of the Lesser lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer and shall commande more than you I was frighted when I read of your knowg what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his ebony Boxe for I was conscious who must have tolde you And againe I ask that you shalle write me as Jedediah and not Simon In this Community a Man may not live too long and you knowe my Plan by which I came back as my Son I am desirous you will Acquaint me with what ye Blacke Man learnt from Sylvanus Cocidius in ye Vault under ye Roman Wall and will be obligd for ye Lendg of ye MS you speak of Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought especially for the following passage I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only by yr Vessels but can not always be certain when to expect them In the Matter spoke of I require onlie one more thing but wish to be sure I apprehend you exactly You inform me that no Part must be missing if the finest Effects are to be had but you can not but know how hard it is to be sure It seems a great Hazard and Burthen to take away the whole Box and in Town ie St Peters St Pauls St Marys or Christ Church it can scarce be done at all But I know what Imperfections were in the one I raisd up October last and how many live Specimens you were forcd to imploy before you hit upon the right Mode in the year  so will be guided by you in all Matters I am impatient for yr Brig and inquire daily at Mr Biddles Wharf A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an unknown alphabet In the Smith diary found by Charles Ward a single oft-repeated combination of characters is clumsily copied and authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic or Abyssinian although they do not recognise the word None of these epistles was ever delivered to Curwen though the disappearance of Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward shewed that the Providence men took certain quiet steps The Pennsylvania Historical Society also has some curious letters received by Dr Shippen regarding the presence of an unwholesome character in Philadelphia But more decisive steps were in the air and it is in the secret assemblages of sworn and tested sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown warehouses by night that we must look for the main fruits of Weedens disclosures Slowly and surely a plan of campaign was under development which would leave no trace of Joseph Curwens noxious mysteries Curwen despite all precautions apparently felt that something was in the wind for he was now remarked to wear an unusually worried look His coach was seen at all hours in the town and on the Pawtuxet Road and he dropped little by little the air of forced geniality with which he had latterly sought to combat the towns prejudice The nearest neighbours to his farm the Fenners one night remarked a great shaft of light shooting into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that cryptical stone building with the high excessively narrow windows an event which they quickly communicated to John Brown in Providence Mr Brown had become the executive leader of the select group bent on Curwens extirpation and had informed the Fenners that some action was about to be taken This he deemed needful because of the impossibility of their not witnessing the final raid and he explained his course by saying that Curwen was known to be a spy of the customs officers at Newport against whom the hand of every Providence shipper merchant and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised Whether the ruse was wholly believed by neighbours who had seen so many queer things is not certain but at any rate the Fenners were willing to connect any evil with a man of such queer ways To them Mr Brown had entrusted the duty of watching the Curwen farmhouse and of regularly reporting every incident which took place there  The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things as suggested by the odd shaft of light precipitated at last the action so carefully devised by the band of serious citizens According to the Smith diary a company of about  men met at  pm on Friday April th  in the great room of Thurstons Tavern at the Sign of the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the Bridge Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to the leader John Brown there were present Dr Bowen with his case of surgical instruments President Manning without the great periwig the largest in the Colonies for which he was noted Governor Hopkins wrapped in his dark cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Esek whom he had initiated at the last moment with the permission of the rest John Carter Capt Mathewson and Capt Whipple who was to lead the actual raiding party These chiefs conferred apart in a rear chamber after which Capt Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions Eleazar Smith was with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival of Ezra Weeden whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the departure of his coach for the farm About  a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge followed by the sound of a coach in the street outside and at that hour there was no need of waiting for Weeden in order to know that the doomed man had set out for his last night of unhallowed wizardry A moment later as the receding coach clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock Bridge Weeden appeared and the raiders fell silently into military order in the street shouldering the firelocks fowling-pieces or whaling harpoons which they had with them Weeden and Smith were with the party and of the deliberating citizens there were present for active service Capt Whipple the leader Capt Esek Hopkins John Carter President Manning Capt Mathewson and Dr Bowen together with Moses Brown who had come up at the eleventh hour though absent from the preliminary session in the tavern All these freemen and their hundred sailors began the long march without delay grim and a trifle apprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the gentle rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road Just beyond Elder Snows church some of the men turned back to take a parting look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars Steeples and gables rose dark and shapely and salt breezes swept up gently from the cove north of the Bridge Vega was climbing above the great hill across the water whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished College edifice At the foot of that hill and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side the old town dreamed Old Providence for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and colossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived as previously agreed at the Fenner farmhouse where they heard a final report on their intended victim He had reached his farm over half an hour before and the strange light had soon afterward shot once into the sky but there were no lights in any visible windows This was always the case of late Even as this news was given another great glare arose toward the south and the party realised that they had indeed come close to the scene of awesome and unnatural wonders Capt Whipple now ordered his force to separate into three divisions one of twenty men under Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-place against possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for desperate service a second of twenty men under Capt Esek Hopkins to steal down into the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in the high steep bank and the third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves Of this division one third was to be led by Capt Mathewson to the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows another third to follow Capt Whipple himself to the main farmhouse and the remaining third to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings until summoned by a final emergency signal The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a single whistle-blast then waiting and capturing anything which might issue from the regions within At the sound of two whistle-blasts it would advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or join the rest of the raiding contingent The party at the stone building would accept these respective signals in an analogous manner forcing an entrance at the first and at the second descending whatever passage into the ground might be discovered and joining the general or focal warfare expected to take place within the caverns A third or emergency signal of three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from its general guard duty its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown depths through both farmhouse and stone building Capt Whipples belief in the existence of catacombs was absolute and he took no alternative into consideration when making his plans He had with him a whistle of great power and shrillness and did not fear any upsetting or misunderstanding of signals The final reserve at the landing of course was nearly out of the whistles range hence would require a special messenger if needed for help Moses Brown and John Carter went with Capt Hopkins to the river-bank while President Manning was detailed with Capt Mathewson to the stone building Dr Bowen with Ezra Weeden remained in Capt Whipples party which was to storm the farmhouse itself The attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from Capt Hopkins had joined Capt Whipple to notify him of the river partys readiness The leader would then deliver the loud single blast and the various advance parties would commence their simultaneous attack on three points Shortly before  am the three divisions left the Fenner farmhouse one to guard the landing another to seek the river valley and the hillside door and the third to subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the Curwen farm Eleazar Smith who accompanied the shore-guarding party records in his diary an uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay broken once by what seemed to be the distant sound of the signal whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying and a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction Later on one man thought he caught some distant gunshots and still later Smith himself felt the throb of titanic and thunderous words resounding in upper air It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odour about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes and never again think or speak of the nights doings or of him who had been Joseph Curwen Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction which his mere words could never have conveyed for though he was a seaman well known to many of them there was something obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart It was the same later on when they met other old companions who had gone into that zone of horror Most of them had lost or gained something imponderable and indescribable They had seen or heard or felt something which was not for human creatures and could not forget it From them there was never any gossip for to even the commonest of mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries And from that single messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed their own lips Very few are the rumours which ever came from any of them and Eleazar Smiths diary is the only written record which has survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign of the Golden Lion under the stars Charles Ward however discovered another vague sidelight in some Fenner correspondence which he found in New London where he knew another branch of the family had lived It seems that the Fenners from whose house the doomed farm was distantly visible had watched the departing columns of raiders and had heard very clearly the angry barking of the Curwen dogs followed by the first shrill blast which precipitated the attack This blast had been followed by a repetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building and in another moment after a quick sounding of the second signal ordering a general invasion there had come a subdued prattle of musketry followed by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had represented in his epistle by the characters WaaaahrrrrrRwaaahrrr This cry however had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey and the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted completely at the sound It was later repeated less loudly and further but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued together with a loud explosion of powder from the direction of the river About an hour afterward all the dogs began to bark frightfully and there were vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the mantelpiece A strong smell of sulphur was noted and Luke Fenners father declared that he heard the third or emergency whistle signal though the others failed to detect it Muffled musketry sounded again followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than those which had preceded it a kind of throaty nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more from its continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought to lie and the human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard Muskets flashed and cracked and the flaming thing fell to the ground A second flaming thing appeared and a shriek of human origin was plainly distinguished Fenner wrote that he could even gather a few words belched in frenzy Almighty protect thy lamb Then there were more shots and the second flaming thing fell After that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour at the end of which time little Arthur Fenner Lukes brother exclaimed that he saw a red fog going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the distance No one but the child can testify to this but Luke admits the significant coincidence implied by the panic of almost convulsive fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the fur of the three cats then within the room Five minutes later a chill wind blew up and the air became suffused with such an intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being noticed by the shore party or by any wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village This stench was nothing which any of the Fenners had ever encountered before and produced a kind of clutching amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget It thundered out of the sky like a doom and windows rattled as its echoes died away It was deep and musical powerful as a bass organ but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs What it said no man can tell for it spoke in an unknown tongue but this is the writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations DEESMEESJESHETBONE DOSEFE DUVEMAENITEMOSS Not till the year  did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal knowledge but Charles Ward paled as he recognised what Mirandola had denounced in shudders as the ultimate horror among black magics incantations An unmistakably human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this malign wonder from the Curwen farm after which the unknown stench grew complex with an added odour equally intolerable A wailing distinctly different from the scream now burst out and was protracted ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms At times it became almost articulate though no auditor could trace any definite words and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and hysterical laughter Then a yell of utter ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of human throatsa yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst after which darkness and silence ruled all things Spirals of acrid smoke ascended to blot out the stars though no flames appeared and no buildings were observed to be gone or injured on the following day Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable odours saturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested a keg of rum for which they paid very well indeed One of them told the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over and that the events of the night were not to be mentioned again Arrogant as the order seemed the aspect of him who gave it took away all resentment and lent it a fearsome authority so that only these furtive letters of Luke Fenner which he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy remain to tell what was seen and heard The non-compliance of that relative whereby the letters were saved after all has alone kept the matter from a merciful oblivion Charles Ward had one detail to add as a result of a long canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral traditions Old Charles Slocum of that village said that there was known to his grandfather a queer rumour concerning a charred distorted body found in the fields a week after the death of Joseph Curwen was announced What kept the talk alive was the notion that this body so far as could be seen in its burnt and twisted condition was neither thoroughly human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about  Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be induced to say a word concerning it and every fragment of the vague data which survives comes from those outside the final fighting party There is something frightful in the care with which these actual raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the matter Eight sailors had been killed but although their bodies were not produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a clash with customs officers had occurred The same statement also covered the numerous cases of wounds all of which were extensively bandaged and treated only by Dr Jabez Bowen who had accompanied the party Hardest to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders a thing which was discussed for weeks Of the citizen leaders Capt Whipple and Moses Brown were most severely hurt and letters of their wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence and close guarding of their bandages produced Psychologically every participant was aged sobered and shaken It is fortunate that they were all strong men of action and simple orthodox religionists for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed President Manning was the most disturbed but even he outgrew the darkest shadow and smothered memories in prayers Every man of those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years and it is perhaps fortunate that this is so Little more than a twelvemonth afterward Capt Whipple led the mob who burnt the revenue ship Gaspee and in this bold act we may trace one step in the blotting out of unwholesome images There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden coffin of curious design obviously found ready on the spot when needed in which she was told her husbands body lay He had it was explained been killed in a customs battle about which it was not politic to give details More than this no tongue ever uttered of Joseph Curwens end and Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith to construct a theory This hint was the merest threada shaky underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Ornes confiscated letter to Curwen as partly copied in Ezra Weedens handwriting The copy was found in the possession of Smiths descendants and we are left to decide whether Weeden gave it to his companion after the end as a mute clue to the abnormality which had occurred or whether as is more probable Smith had it before and added the underscoring himself from what he had managed to extract from his friend by shrewd guessing and adroit cross-questioning The underlined passage is merely this I say to you againe doe not call up Any that you can not put downe by the Which I meane Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use Ask of the Lesser lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer and shall commande more than you In the light of this passage and reflecting on what last unmentionable allies a beaten man might try to summon in his direst extremity Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen of Providence killed Joseph Curwen The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from Providence life and annals was vastly aided by the influence of the raiding leaders They had not at first meant to be so thorough and had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance of the true conditions but Capt Tillinghast was an astute man and soon uncovered enough rumours to whet his horror and cause him to demand that his daughter and granddaughter change their name burn the library and all remaining papers and chisel the inscription from the slate slab above Joseph Curwens grave He knew Capt Whipple well and probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner than anyone else ever gained respecting the end of the accused sorcerer From that time on the obliteration of Curwens memory became increasingly rigid extending at last by common consent even to the town records and files of the Gazette It can be compared in spirit only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wildes name for a decade after his disgrace and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsanys tale whom the Gods decided must not only cease to be but must cease ever to have been Mrs Tillinghast as the widow became known after  sold the house in Olney Court and resided with her father in Powers Lane till her death in  The farm at Pawtuxet shunned by every living soul remained to moulder through the years and seemed to decay with unaccountable rapidity By  only the stone and brickwork were standing and by  even these had fallen to shapeless heaps None ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on the river-bank behind which the hillside door may have lain nor did any try to frame a definite image of the scenes amidst which Joseph Curwen departed from the horrors he had wrought Only robust old Capt Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter once in a while to himself Pox on that  but he had no business to laugh while he screamed Twas as though the damnd  had someat up his sleeve For half a crown Id burn his  house III A Search and an Evocation Charles Ward as we have seen first learned in  of his descent from Joseph Curwen That he at once took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wondered at for every vague rumour that he had heard of Curwen now became something vital to himself in whom flowed Curwens blood No spirited and imaginative genealogist could have done otherwise than begin forthwith an avid and systematic collection of Curwen data In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy so that even Dr Lyman hesitates to date the youths madness from any period before the close of  He talked freely with his familythough his mother was not particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwenand with the officials of the various museums and libraries he visited In applying to private families for records thought to be in their possession he made no concealment of his object and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and letter-writers were regarded He often expressed a keen wonder as to what really had taken place a century and a half before at that Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find and what Joseph Curwen really had been When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter from Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwens early activities and connexions there which he did during the Easter vacation of  At the Essex Institute which was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs he was very kindly received and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen data He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village now Danvers seven miles from town on the eighteenth of February OS  and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen not appearing again for nine years when he returned with the speech dress and manners of a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper At that time he had little to do with his family but spent most of his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe and the strange chemicals which came for him on ships from England France and Holland Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of much local inquisitiveness and were whisperingly associated with vague rumours of fires on the hills at night Curwens only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village and one Simon Orne of Salem With these men he was often seen in conference about the Common and visits among them were by no means infrequent Hutchinson had a house well out toward the woods and it was not altogether liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard there at night He was said to entertain strange visitors and the lights seen from his windows were not always of the same colour The knowledge he displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly unwholesome and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic began never to be heard from again At that time Joseph Curwen also departed but his settlement in Providence was soon learned of Simon Orne lived in Salem until  when his failure to grow visibly old began to excite attention He thereafter disappeared though thirty years later his precise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to claim his property The claim was allowed on the strength of documents in Simon Ornes known hand and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in Salem till  when certain letters from Providence citizens to the Rev Thomas Barnard and others brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown Certain documents by and about all of these strange characters were available at the Essex Institute the Court House and the Registry of Deeds and included both harmless commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale and furtive fragments of a more provocative nature There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records as when one Hepzibah Lawson swore on July   at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge Hathorne that fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mr Hutchinsons house and one Amity How declared at a session of August th before Judge Gedney that Mr G B Rev George Burroughs on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S Jonathan A Simon O Deliverance W Joseph C Susan P Mehitable C and Deborah B Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinsons uncanny library as found after his disappearance and an unfinished manuscript in his handwriting couched in a cipher none could read Ward had a photostatic copy of this manuscript made and began to work casually on the cipher as soon as it was delivered to him After the following August his labours on the cipher became intense and feverish and there is reason to believe from his speech and conduct that he hit upon the key before October or November He never stated though whether or not he had succeeded But of the greatest immediate interest was the Orne material It took Ward only a short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he had already considered established from the text of the letter to Curwen namely that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the same person As Orne had said to his correspondent it was hardly safe to live too long in Salem hence he resorted to a thirty-year sojourn abroad and did not return to claim his lands except as a representative of a new generation Orne had apparently been careful to destroy most of his correspondence but the citizens who took action in  found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Ward now either copied with care or had photographed and one extremely mysterious letter in a chirography that the searcher recognised from items in the Registry of Deeds as positively Joseph Curwens This Curwen letter though undated as to the year was evidently not the one in answer to which Orne had written the confiscated missive and from internal evidence Ward placed it not much later than  It may not be amiss to give the text in full as a sample of the style of one whose history was so dark and terrible The recipient is addressed as Simon but a line whether drawn by Curwen or Orne Ward could not tell is run through the word Prouidence I May Ut vulgo Brother My honourd Antient ffriende due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him whom we serve for yr eternall Power I am just come upon That which you ought to knowe concerng the Matter of the Laste Extremitie and what to doe regardg yt I am not disposd to followe you in gog Away on acct of my Yeares for Prouidence hath not ye Sharpeness of ye Bay in huntg oute uncommon Things and bringinge to Tryall I am tyd up in Shippes and Goodes and coud not doe as you did besides the Whiche my ffarme at Patuxet hath under it What you Knowe that woud not waite for my comg Backe as an Other But I am not unreadie for harde ffortunes as I haue tolde you and haue longe workd upon ye Way of getg Backe after ye Laste I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE and sawe for ye firste Time that fface spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye  And IT said that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle With Sunne in V House Saturne in Trine drawe ye Pentagram of Fire and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallows Eue and ye Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe tho knowg not what he seekes Yett will this availe Nothing if there be no Heir and if the Saltes or the Way to make the Saltes bee not Readie for his Hande and here I will owne I have not taken needed Stepps nor founde Much Ye Process is plaguy harde to come neare and it uses up such a Store of Specimens I am harde putte to it to get Enough notwithstandg the Sailors I have from ye Indies Ye People aboute are become curious but I can stande them off Ye Gentry are worse than the Populace beg more Circumstantiall in their Accts and more believd in what they tell That Parson and Mr Merritt have talkd some I am fearfull but no Thing soe far is Dangerous Ye Chymical substances are easie of getg there beg II goode Chymists in Towne Dr Bowen and Sam Carew I am follg oute what Borellus saith and haue Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII Booke Whatever I gette you shal haue And in ye meane while do not neglect to make use of ye Wordes I haue here giuen I haue them Righte but if you Desire to see HIM imploy the Writings on ye Piece of  that I am puttg in this Packet Saye ye Uerses every Roodmas and Hallows Eue and if yr Line runn out not one shall bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what Saltes or Stuff for Saltes you shal leaue him Job XIV XIV I rejoice you are again at Salem and hope I may see you not longe hence I have a goode Stallion and am thinkg of getg a Coach there beg one Mr Merritts in Prouidence already tho ye Roades are bad If you are disposd to Travel doe not pass me bye From Boston take ye Post Rd thro Dedham Wrentham and Attleborough goode Taverns beg at all these Townes Stop at Mr Bolcoms in Wrentham where ye Beddes are finer than Mr Hatchs but eate at ye other House for their Cooke is better Turne into Prou by Patucket ffalls and ye Rd past Mr Sayless Tavern My House opp Mr Epenetus Olneys Tavern off ye Towne Street Ist on ye N side of Olneys Court Distance from Boston Stone abt XLIV Miles Sir I am yr olde and true ffriend and Servt in Almousin-Metraton Josephus C To Mr Simon Orne Williams-Lane in Salem This letter oddly enough was what first gave Ward the exact location of Curwens Providence home for none of the records encountered up to that time had been at all specific The discovery was doubly striking because it indicated as the newer Curwen house built in  on the site of the old a dilapidated building still standing in Olney Court and well known to Ward in his antiquarian rambles over Stampers Hill The place was indeed only a few squares from his own home on the great hills higher ground and was now the abode of a negro family much esteemed for occasional washing housecleaning and furnace-tending services To find in distant Salem such sudden proof of the significance of this familiar rookery in his own family history was a highly impressive thing to Ward and he resolved to explore the place immediately upon his return The more mystical phases of the letter which he took to be some extravagant kind of symbolism frankly baffled him though he noted with a thrill of curiosity that the Biblical passage referred toJob  was the familiar verse If a man die shall he live again All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come  Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement and spent the following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court The place now crumbling with age had never been a mansion but was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of the familiar Providence colonial type with plain peaked roof large central chimney and artistically carved doorway with rayed fanlight triangular pediment and trim Doric pilasters It had suffered but little alteration externally and Ward felt he was gazing on something very close to the sinister matters of his quest The present negro inhabitants were known to him and he was very courteously shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah Here there was more change than the outside indicated and Ward saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels and shell-carved cupboard linings were gone whilst much of the fine wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked hacked and gouged or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper In general the survey did not yield as much as Ward had somehow expected but it was at least exciting to stand within the ancestral walls which had housed such a man of horror as Joseph Curwen He saw with a thrill that a monogram had been very carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local Curwen data The former still proved unyielding but of the latter he obtained so much and so many clues to similar data elsewhere that he was ready by July to make a trip to New London and New York to consult old letters whose presence in those places was indicated This trip was very fruitful for it brought him the Fenner letters with their terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid and the Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the portrait painted on a panel of the Curwen library This matter of the portrait interested him particularly since he would have given much to know just what Joseph Curwen looked like and he decided to make a second search of the house in Olney Court to see if there might not be some trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paint or layers of mouldy wall-paper Early in August that search took place and Ward went carefully over the walls of every room sizeable enough to have been by any possibility the library of the evil builder He paid especial attention to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained and was keenly excited after about an hour when on a broad area above the fireplace in a spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was sensibly darker than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it was likely to have been A few more careful tests with a thin knife and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent With truly scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which an immediate attempt to uncover the hidden picture with the knife might have done but just retired from the scene of his discovery to enlist expert help In three days he returned with an artist of long experience Mr Walter C Dwight whose studio is near the foot of College Hill and that accomplished restorer of paintings set to work at once with proper methods and chemical substances Old Asa and his wife were duly excited over their strange visitors and were properly reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth As day by day the work of restoration progressed Charles Ward looked on with growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled after their long oblivion Dwight had begun at the bottom hence since the picture was a three-quarter-length one the face did not come out for some time It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a spare well-shaped man with dark-blue coat embroidered waistcoat black satin small-clothes and white silk stockings seated in a carved chair against the background of a window with wharves and ships beyond When the head came out it was observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig and to possess a thin calm undistinguished face which seemed somehow familiar to both Ward and the artist Only at the very last though did the restorer and his client begin to gasp with astonishment at the details of that lean pallid visage and to recognise with a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity had played For it took the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the delicate scraper to bring out fully the expression which centuries had hidden and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward dweller in the past with his own living features in the countenance of his horrible great-great-great-grandfather Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered and his father at once determined to purchase the picture despite its execution on stationary panelling The resemblance to the boy despite an appearance of rather greater age was marvellous and it could be seen that through some trick of atavism the physical contours of Joseph Curwen had found precise duplication after a century and a half Mrs Wards resemblance to her ancestor was not at all marked though she could recall relatives who had some of the facial characteristics shared by her son and by the bygone Curwen She did not relish the discovery and told her husband that he had better burn the picture instead of bringing it home There was she averred something unwholesome about it not only intrinsically but in its very resemblance to Charles Mr Ward however was a practical man of power and affairsa cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet Valleyand not one to listen to feminine scruples The picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his son and he believed the boy deserved it as a present In this opinion it is needless to say Charles most heartily concurred and a few days later Mr Ward located the owner of the housea small rodent-featured person with a guttural accentand obtained the whole mantel and overmantel bearing the picture at a curtly fixed priced which cut short the impending torrent of unctuous haggling It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home where provisions were made for its thorough restoration and installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charless third-floor study or library To Charles was left the task of superintending this removal and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the house in Olney Court where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached with great care and precision for transportation in the companys motor truck There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the chimneys course and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess about a foot square which must have lain directly behind the head of the portrait Curious as to what such a space might mean or contain the youth approached and looked within finding beneath the deep coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed papers a crude thick copybook and a few mouldering textile shreds which may have formed the ribbon binding the rest together Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and cinders he took up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover It was in a hand which he had learned to recognise at the Essex Institute and proclaimed the volume as the Journall and Notes of Jos Curwen Gent of Providence-Plantations Late of Salem Excited beyond measure by his discovery Ward shewed the book to the two curious workmen beside him Their testimony is absolute as to the nature and genuineness of the finding and Dr Willett relies on them to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he began his major eccentricities All the other papers were likewise in Curwens handwriting and one of them seemed especially portentous because of its inscription To Him Who Shal Come After  How He May Gett Beyonde Time  ye Spheres Another was in a cipher the same Ward hoped as the Hutchinson cipher which had hitherto baffled him A third and here the searcher rejoiced seemed to be a key to the cipher whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to Edw Hutchinson Armiger and Jedediah Orne Esq or Their Heir or Heirs or Those Representg Them The sixth and last was inscribed Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Betn ye yeares  and  Of Whither He Voyagd Where He Stayd Whom He Sawe and What He Learnt  We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of alienists date Charles Wards madness Upon his discovery the youth had looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and manuscripts and had evidently seen something which impressed him tremendously Indeed in shewing the titles to the workmen he appeared to guard the text itself with peculiar care and to labour under a perturbation for which even the antiquarian and genealogical significance of the find could hardly account Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost embarrassed air as if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme importance without having to exhibit the evidence itself He did not even shew the titles to his parents but simply told them that he had found some documents in Joseph Curwens handwriting mostly in cipher which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding up their true meaning It is unlikely that he would have shewn what he did to the workmen had it not been for their unconcealed curiosity As it was he doubtless wished to avoid any display of peculiar reticence which would increase their discussion of the matter That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book and papers and when day came he did not desist His meals on his urgent request when his mother called to see what was amiss were sent up to him and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when the men came to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his study The next night he slept in snatches in his clothes meanwhile wrestling feverishly with the unravelling of the cipher manuscript In the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher which he had frequently shewn her before but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be applied to it That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the men fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture with its woodwork above a cleverly realistic electric log setting the mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the north wall as if a chimney existed and boxing in the sides with panelling to match the rooms The front panel holding the picture was sawn and hinged to allow cupboard space behind it After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and sat down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding and century-recalling mirror His parents subsequently recalling his conduct at this period give interesting details anent the policy of concealment which he practiced Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might be studying since he rightly assumed that Curwens intricate and archaic chirography would be too much for them With his parents however he was more circumspect and unless the manuscript in question were a cipher or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs as that entitled To Him Who Shal Come After etc seemed to be he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had departed At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of his where he also placed them whenever he left the room He soon resumed fairly regular hours and habits except that his long walks and other outside interests seemed to cease The opening of school where he now began his senior year seemed a great bore to him and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother with college He had he said important special investigations to make which would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than any university which the world could boast Naturally only one who had always been more or less studious eccentric and solitary could have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice Ward however was constitutionally a scholar and a hermit hence his parents were less surprised than regretful at the close confinement and secrecy he adopted At the same time both his father and mother thought it odd that he would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove nor give any connected account of such data as he had deciphered This reticence he explained away as due to a wish to wait until he might announce some connected revelation but as the weeks passed without further disclosures there began to grow up between the youth and his family a kind of constraint intensified in his mothers case by her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings During October Ward began visiting the libraries again but no longer for the antiquarian matter of his former days Witchcraft and magic occultism and daemonology were what he sought now and when Providence sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap the wealth of the great library in Copley Square the Widener Library at Harvard or the Zion Research Library in Brookline where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available He bought extensively and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly acquired works on uncanny subjects while during the Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult certain records at the Essex Institute About the middle of January  there entered Wards bearing an element of triumph which he did not explain and he was no more found at work upon the Hutchinson cipher Instead he inaugurated a dual policy of chemical research and record-scanning fitting up for the one a laboratory in the unused attic of the house and for the latter haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence Local dealers in drugs and scientific supplies later questioned gave astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and instruments he purchased but clerks at the State House the City Hall and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second interest He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of Joseph Curwen from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely blotted the name Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something was wrong Charles had had freaks and changes of minor interests before but this growing secrecy and absorption in strange pursuits was unlike even him His school work was the merest pretence and although he failed in no test it could be seen that the old application had all vanished He had other concernments now and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemical books could be found either poring over old burial records down town or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his study where the startlinglyone almost fancied increasinglysimilar features of Joseph Curwen stared blandly at him from the great overmantel on the north wall Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of rambles about the various ancient cemeteries of the city The cause appeared later when it was learned from City Hall clerks that he had probably found an important clue His quest had suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one Naphthali Field and this shift was explained when upon going over the files that he had been over the investigators actually found a fragmentary record of Curwens burial which had escaped the general obliteration and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been interred  ft S and  ft W of Naphthali Fields grave in ye The lack of a specified burying-ground in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search and Naphthali Fields grave seemed as elusive as that of Curwen but here no systematic effacement had existed and one might reasonably be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had perished Hence the ramblesfrom which St Johns the former Kings Churchyard and the ancient Congregational burying-ground in the midst of Swan Point Cemetery were excluded since other statistics had shewn that the only Naphthali Field obiit  whose grave could have been meant had been a Baptist  It was toward May when Dr Willett at the request of the senior Ward and fortified with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned from Charles in his non-secretive days talked with the young man The interview was of little value or conclusiveness for Willett felt at every moment that Charles was thoroughly master of himself and in touch with matters of real importance but it at least forced the secretive youth to offer some rational explanation of his recent demeanour Of a pallid impassive type not easily shewing embarrassment Ward seemed quite ready to discuss his pursuits though not to reveal their object He stated that the papers of his ancestor had contained some remarkable secrets of early scientific knowledge for the most part in cipher of an apparent scope comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and perhaps surpassing even those They were however meaningless except when correlated with a body of learning now wholly obsolete so that their immediate presentation to a world equipped only with modern science would rob them of all impressiveness and dramatic significance To take their vivid place in the history of human thought they must first be correlated by one familiar with the background out of which they evolved and to this task of correlation Ward was now devoting himself He was seeking to acquire as fast as possible those neglected arts of old which a true interpreter of the Curwen data must possess and hoped in time to make a full announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to the world of thought Not even Einstein he declared could more profoundly revolutionise the current conception of things As to his graveyard search whose object he freely admitted but the details of whose progress he did not relate he said he had reason to think that Joseph Curwens mutilated headstone bore certain mystic symbolscarved from directions in his will and ignorantly spared by those who had effaced the namewhich were absolutely essential to the final solution of his cryptic system Curwen he believed had wished to guard his secret with care and had consequently distributed the data in an exceedingly curious fashion When Dr Willett asked to see the mystic documents Ward displayed much reluctance and tried to put him off with such things as photostatic copies of the Hutchinson cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams but finally shewed him the exteriors of some of the real Curwen findsthe Journall and Notes the cipher title in cipher also and the formula-filled message To Him Who Shal Come Afterand let him glance inside such as were in obscure characters He also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its innocuousness and gave Willett a glimpse of Curwens connected handwriting in English The doctor noted very closely the crabbed and complicated letters and the general aura of the seventeenth century which clung round both penmanship and style despite the writers survival into the eighteenth century and became quickly certain that the document was genuine The text itself was relatively trivial and Willett recalled only a fragment Wedn  Octr  My Sloope the Wakeful this Day putt in from London with XX newe Men pickd up in ye Indies Spaniards from Martineco and  Dutch Men from Surinam Ye Dutch Men are like to Desert from haveg hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures but I will see to ye Inducing of them to Staye ffor Mr Knight Dexter of ye Boy and Book  Pieces Camblets  Pieces Assrtd Cambleteens  Pieces blue Duffles  Pieces Shalloons  Pieces Calamancoes  Pieces each Shendsoy and Humhums ffor Mr Green at ye Elephant  Gallon Cyttles  Warmg Pannes  Bake Cyttles  pr Smokeg Tonges ffor Mr Perrigo  Sett of Awles ffor Mr Nightingale  Reames prime Foolscap Sayd ye SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but None appeard I must heare more from Mr H in Transylvania tho it is Harde reachg him and exceeding strange he can not give me the Use of what he hath so well usd these hundred yeares Simon hath not Writ these V Weekes but I expecte soon hearg from him When upon reaching this point Dr Willett turned the leaf he was quickly checked by Ward who almost snatched the book from his grasp All that the doctor had a chance to see on the newly opened page was a brief pair of sentences but these strangely enough lingered tenaciously in his memory They ran Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus beg spoke V Roodmasses and IV Hallows-Eves I am Hopeful ye Thing is breedg Outside ye Spheres It will drawe One who is to Come if I can make sure he shal bee and he shall think on Past thinges and look back thro all ye yeares against ye which I must have ready ye Saltes or That to make em with Willett saw no more but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague terror to the painted features of Joseph Curwen which stared blandly down from the overmantel Ever after that he entertained the odd fancywhich his medical skill of course assured him was only a fancythat the eyes of the portrait had a sort of wish if not an actual tendency to follow young Charles Ward as he moved about the room He stopped before leaving to study the picture closely marvelling at its resemblance to Charles and memorising every minute detail of the cryptical colourless face even down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth brow above the right eye Cosmo Alexander he decided was a painter worthy of the Scotland that produced Raeburn and a teacher worthy of his illustrious pupil Gilbert Stuart Assured by the doctor that Charless mental health was in no danger but that on the other hand he was engaged in researches which might prove of real importance the Wards were more lenient than they might otherwise have been when during the following June the youth made positive his refusal to attend college He had he declared studies of much more vital importance to pursue and intimated a wish to go abroad the following year in order to avail himself of certain sources of data not existing in America The senior Ward while denying this latter wish as absurd for a boy of only eighteen acquiesced regarding the university so that after a none too brilliant graduation from the Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three-year period of intensive occult study and graveyard searching He became recognised as an eccentric and dropped even more completely from the sight of his familys friends than he had been before keeping close to his work and only occasionally making trips to other cities to consult obscure records Once he went south to talk with a strange old mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and about whom a newspaper had printed a curious article Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks whence reports of certain odd ceremonial practices had come But still his parents forbade him the trip to the Old World which he desired Coming of age in April  and having previously inherited a small competence from his maternal grandfather Ward determined at last to take the European trip hitherto denied him Of his proposed itinerary he would say nothing save that the needs of his studies would carry him to many places but he promised to write his parents fully and faithfully When they saw he could not be dissuaded they ceased all opposition and helped as best they could so that in June the young man sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his father and mother who accompanied him to Boston and waved him out of sight from the White Star pier in Charlestown Letters soon told of his safe arrival and of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street London where he proposed to stay shunning all family friends till he had exhausted the resources of the British Museum in a certain direction Of his daily life he wrote but little for there was little to write Study and experiment consumed all his time and he mentioned a laboratory which he had established in one of his rooms That he said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its luring skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads and alleys whose mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately beckon and surprise was taken by his parents as a good index of the degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind In June  a brief note told of his departure for Paris to which he had before made one or two flying trips for material in the Bibliothque Nationale For three months thereafter he sent only postal cards giving an address in the Rue St Jacques and referring to a special search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed private collector He avoided acquaintances and no tourists brought back reports of having seen him Then came a silence and in October the Wards received a picture card from Prague Czecho-Slovakia stating that Charles was in that ancient town for the purpose of conferring with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor of some very curious mediaeval information He gave an address in the Neustadt and announced no move till the following January when he dropped several cards from Vienna telling of his passage through that city on the way toward a more easterly region whither one of his correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had invited him The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania and told of Wards progress toward his destination He was going to visit a Baron Ferenczy whose estate lay in the mountains east of Rakus and was to be addressed at Rakus in the care of that nobleman Another card from Rakus a week later saying that his hosts carriage had met him and that he was leaving the village for the mountains was his last message for a considerable time indeed he did not reply to his parents frequent letters until May when he wrote to discourage the plan of his mother for a meeting in London Paris or Rome during the summer when the elder Wards were planning to travel in Europe His researches he said were such that he could not leave his present quarters while the situation of Baron Ferenczys castle did not favour visits It was on a crag in the dark wooded mountains and the region was so shunned by the country folk that normal people could not help feeling ill at ease Moreover the Baron was not a person likely to appeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk His aspect and manners had idiosyncrasies and his age was so great as to be disquieting It would be better Charles said if his parents would wait for his return to Providence which could scarcely be far distant That return did not however take place until May  when after a few heralding cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on the Homeric and traversed the long miles to Providence by motor-coach eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills the fragrant blossoming orchards and the white steepled towns of vernal Connecticut his first taste of ancient New England in nearly four years When the coach crossed the Pawcatuck and entered Rhode Island amidst the faery goldenness of a late spring afternoon his heart beat with quickened force and the entry to Providence along Reservoir and Elmwood avenues was a breathless and wonderful thing despite the depths of forbidden lore to which he had delved At the high square where Broad Weybosset and Empire Streets join he saw before and below him in the fire of sunset the pleasant remembered houses and domes and steeples of the old town and his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down to the terminal behind the Biltmore bringing into view the great dome and soft roof-pierced greenery of the ancient hill across the river and the tall colonial spire of the First Baptist Church limned pink in the magic evening light against the fresh springtime verdure of its precipitous background Old Providence It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long continuous history which had brought him into being and which had drawn him back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix Here lay the arcana wondrous or dreadful as the case might be for which all his years of travel and application had been preparing him A taxicab whirled him through Post Office Square with its glimpse of the river the old Market House and the head of the bay and up the steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect where the vast gleaming dome and sunset-flushed Ionic columns of the Christian Science Church beckoned northward Then eight squares past the fine old estates his childish eyes had known and the quaint brick sidewalks so often trodden by his youthful feet And at last the little white overtaken farmhouse on the right on the left the classic Adam porch and stately bayed facade of the great brick house where he was born It was twilight and Charles Dexter Ward had come home  A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr Lymans assign to Wards European trip the beginning of his true madness Admitting that he was sane when he started they believe that his conduct upon returning implies a disastrous change But even to this claim Dr Willett refuses to accede There was he insists something later and the queernesses of the youth at this stage he attributes to the practice of rituals learned abroadodd enough things to be sure but by no means implying mental aberration on the part of their celebrant Ward himself though visibly aged and hardened was still normal in his general reactions and in several talks with Willett displayed a balance which no madmaneven an incipient onecould feign continuously for long What elicited the notion of insanity at this period were the sounds heard at all hours from Wards attic laboratory in which he kept himself most of the time There were chantings and repetitions and thunderous declamations in uncanny rhythms and although these sounds were always in Wards own voice there was something in the quality of that voice and in the accents of the formulae it pronounced which could not but chill the blood of every hearer It was noticed that Nig the venerable and beloved black cat of the household bristled and arched his back perceptibly when certain of the tones were heard The odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise exceedingly strange Sometimes they were very noxious but more often they were aromatic with a haunting elusive quality which seemed to have the power of inducing fantastic images People who smelled them had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas with strange hills or endless avenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into infinite distance Ward did not resume his old-time rambles but applied himself diligently to the strange books he had brought home and to equally strange delvings within his quarters explaining that European sources had greatly enlarged the possibilities of his work and promising great revelations in the years to come His older aspect increased to a startling degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his library and Dr Willett would often pause by the latter after a call marvelling at the virtual identity and reflecting that only the small pit above the pictures right eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard from the living youth These calls of Willetts undertaken at the request of the senior Wards were curious affairs Ward at no time repulsed the doctor but the latter saw that he could never reach the young mans inner psychology Frequently he noted peculiar things about little wax images of grotesque design on the shelves or tables and the half-erased remnants of circles triangles and pentagrams in chalk or charcoal on the cleared central space of the large room And always in the night those rhythms and incantations thundered till it became very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive talk of Charless madness In January  a peculiar incident occurred One night about midnight as Charles was chanting a ritual whose weird cadence echoed unpleasantly through the house below there came a sudden gust of chill wind from the bay and a faint obscure trembling of the earth which everyone in the neighbourhood noted At the same time the cat exhibited phenomenal traces of fright while dogs bayed for as much as a mile around This was the prelude to a sharp thunderstorm anomalous for the season which brought with it such a crash that Mr and Mrs Ward believed the house had been struck They rushed upstairs to see what damage had been done but Charles met them at the door to the attic pale resolute and portentous with an almost fearsome combination of triumph and seriousness on his face He assured them that the house had not really been struck and that the storm would soon be over They paused and looking through a window saw that he was indeed right for the lightning flashed farther and farther off whilst the trees ceased to bend in the strange frigid gust from the water The thunder sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died away Stars came out and the stamp of triumph on Charles Wards face crystallised into a very singular expression For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined than usual to his laboratory He exhibited a curious interest in the weather and made odd inquiries about the date of the spring thawing of the ground One night late in March he left the house after midnight and did not return till almost morning when his mother being wakeful heard a rumbling motor draw up to the carriage entrance Muffled oaths could be distinguished and Mrs Ward rising and going to the window saw four dark figures removing a long heavy box from a truck at Charless direction and carrying it within by the side door She heard laboured breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs and finally a dull thumping in the attic after which the footfalls descended again and the four men reappeared outside and drove off in their truck The next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion drawing down the dark shades of his laboratory windows and appearing to be working on some metal substance He would open the door to no one and steadfastly refused all proffered food About noon a wrenching sound followed by a terrible cry and a fall were heard but when Mrs Ward rapped at the door her son at length answered faintly and told her that nothing had gone amiss The hideous and indescribable stench now welling out was absolutely harmless and unfortunately necessary Solitude was the one prime essential and he would appear later for dinner That afternoon after the conclusion of some odd hissing sounds which came from behind the locked portal he did finally appear wearing an extremely haggard aspect and forbidding anyone to enter the laboratory upon any pretext This indeed proved the beginning of a new policy of secrecy for never afterward was any other person permitted to visit either the mysterious garret workroom or the adjacent storeroom which he cleaned out furnished roughly and added to his inviolably private domain as a sleeping apartment Here he lived with books brought up from his library beneath till the time he purchased the Pawtuxet bungalow and moved to it all his scientific effects In the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family and damaged part of it through an apparent accident Later on Dr Willett having fixed the date from statements by various members of the household looked up an intact copy at the Journal office and found that in the destroyed section the following small item had occurred Nocturnal Diggers Surprised inNorth Burial Ground Robert Hart night watchman at the North Burial Ground this morning discovered a party of several men with a motor truck in the oldest part of the cemetery but apparently frightened them off before they had accomplished whatever their object may have been The discovery took place at about four oclock when Harts attention was attracted by the sound of a motor outside his shelter Investigating he saw a large truck on the main drive several rods away but could not reach it before the sound of his feet on the gravel had revealed his approach The men hastily placed a large box in the truck and drove away toward the street before they could be overtaken and since no known grave was disturbed Hart believes that this box was an object which they wished to bury The diggers must have been at work for a long while before detection for Hart found an enormous hole dug at a considerable distance back from the roadway in the lot of Amasa Field where most of the old stones have long ago disappeared The hole a place as large and deep as a grave was empty and did not coincide with any interment mentioned in the cemetery records Sergt Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the opinion that the hole was dug by bootleggers rather gruesomely and ingeniously seeking a safe cache for liquor in a place not likely to be disturbed In reply to questions Hart said he thought the escaping truck had headed up Rochambeau Avenue though he could not be sure During the next few days Ward was seldom seen by his family Having added sleeping quarters to his attic realm he kept closely to himself there ordering food brought to the door and not taking it in until after the servant had gone away The droning of monotonous formulae and the chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at intervals while at other times occasional listeners could detect the sound of tinkling glass hissing chemicals running water or roaring gas flames Odours of the most unplaceable quality wholly unlike any before noted hung at times around the door and the air of tension observable in the young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forth was such as to excite the keenest speculation Once he made a hasty trip to the Athenaeum for a book he required and again he hired a messenger to fetch him a highly obscure volume from Boston Suspense was written portentously over the whole situation and both the family and Dr Willett confessed themselves wholly at a loss what to do or think about it  Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred While nothing appeared to grow different in kind there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree and Dr Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change The day was Good Friday a circumstance of which the servants made much but which others quite naturally dismiss as an irrelevant coincidence Late in the afternoon young Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice at the same time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire house The formula was so plainly audible in the hall outside the locked door that Mrs Ward could not help memorising it as she waited and listened anxiously and later on she was able to write it down at Dr Willetts request It ran as follows and experts have told Dr Willett that its very close analogue can be found in the mystic writings of Eliphas Levi that cryptic soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed the frightful vistas of the void beyond Per Adonai Eloim Adonai Jehova Adonai Sabaoth Metraton On Agla Mathon verbum pythonicum mysterium salamandrae conventus sylvorum antra gnomorum daemonia Coeli Gad Almousin Gibor Jehosua Evam Zariatnatmik veni veni veni This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over all the neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in The extent of this howling can be judged from the space it received in the papers the next day but to those in the Ward household it was overshadowed by the odour which instantly followed it a hideous all-pervasive odour which none of them had ever smelt before or have ever smelt since In the midst of this mephitic flood there came a very perceptible flash like that of lightning which would have been blinding and impressive but for the daylight around and then was heard the voice that no listener can ever forget because of its thunderous remoteness its incredible depth and its eldritch dissimilarity to Charles Wards voice It shook the house and was clearly heard by at least two neighbours above the howling of the dogs Mrs Ward who had been listening in despair outside her sons locked laboratory shivered as she recognised its hellish import for Charles had told her of its evil fame in dark books and of the manner in which it had thundered according to the Fenner letters above the doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on the night of Joseph Curwens annihilation There was no mistaking that nightmare phrase for Charles had described it too vividly in the old days when he had talked frankly of his Curwen investigations And yet it was only this fragment of an archaic and forgotten language DIES MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS Close upon this thundering there came a momentary darkening of the daylight though sunset was still an hour distant and then a puff of added odour different from the first but equally unknown and intolerable Charles was chanting again now and his mother could hear syllables that sounded like Yi-nash-Yog-Sothoth-he-lgeb-fi-throdogending in a Yah whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo A second later all previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst out with frantic explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and hysterical laughter Mrs Ward with the mingled fear and blind courage of maternity advanced and knocked affrightedly at the concealing panels but obtained no sign of recognition She knocked again but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose this one unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son and sounding concurrently with the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice Presently she fainted although she is still unable to recall the precise and immediate cause Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions Mr Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six and not finding his wife downstairs was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching at Charless door from which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before Mounting the stairs at once he saw Mrs Ward stretched at full length on the floor of the corridor outside the laboratory and realising that she had fainted hastened to fetch a glass of water from a set bowl in a neighbouring alcove Dashing the cold fluid in her face he was heartened to observe an immediate response on her part and was watching the bewildered opening of her eyes when a chill shot through him and threatened to reduce him to the very state from which she was emerging For the seemingly silent laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be but held the murmurs of a tense muffled conversation in tones too low for comprehension yet of a quality profoundly disturbing to the soul It was not of course new for Charles to mutter formulae but this muttering was definitely different It was so palpably a dialogue or imitation of a dialogue with the regular alteration of inflections suggesting question and answer statement and response One voice was undisguisedly that of Charles but the other had a depth and hollowness which the youths best powers of ceremonial mimicry had scarcely approached before There was something hideous blasphemous and abnormal about it and but for a cry from his recovering wife which cleared his mind by arousing his protective instincts it is not likely that Theodore Howland Ward could have maintained for nearly a year more his old boast that he had never fainted As it was he seized his wife in his arms and bore her quickly downstairs before she could notice the voices which had so horribly disturbed him Even so however he was not quick enough to escape catching something himself which caused him to stagger dangerously with his burden For Mrs Wards cry had evidently been heard by others than he and there had come from behind the locked door the first distinguishable words which that masked and terrible colloquy had yielded They were merely an excited caution in Charless own voice but somehow their implications held a nameless fright for the father who overheard them The phrase was just this Sshhwrite Mr and Mrs Ward conferred at some length after dinner and the former resolved to have a firm and serious talk with Charles that very night No matter how important the object such conduct could no longer be permitted for these latest developments transcended every limit of sanity and formed a menace to the order and nervous well-being of the entire household The youth must indeed have taken complete leave of his senses since only downright madness could have prompted the wild screams and imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present day had brought forth All this must be stopped or Mrs Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servants become an impossibility Mr Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for Charless laboratory On the third floor however he paused at the sounds which he heard proceeding from the now disused library of his son Books were apparently being flung about and papers wildly rustled and upon stepping to the door Mr Ward beheld the youth within excitedly assembling a vast armful of literary matter of every size and shape Charless aspect was very drawn and haggard and he dropped his entire load with a start at the sound of his fathers voice At the elder mans command he sat down and for some time listened to the admonitions he had so long deserved There was no scene At the end of the lecture he agreed that his father was right and that his noises mutterings incantations and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable nuisances He agreed to a policy of greater quiet though insisting on a prolongation of his extreme privacy Much of his future work he said was in any case purely book research and he could obtain quarters elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be necessary at a later stage For the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed the keenest contrition and explained that the conversation later heard was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a certain mental atmosphere His use of abstruse technical terms somewhat bewildered Mr Ward but the parting impression was one of undeniable sanity and poise despite a mysterious tension of the utmost gravity The interview was really quite inconclusive and as Charles picked up his armful and left the room Mr Ward hardly knew what to make of the entire business It was as mysterious as the death of poor old Nig whose stiffening form had been found an hour before in the basement with staring eyes and fear-distorted mouth Driven by some vague detective instinct the bewildered parent now glanced curiously at the vacant shelves to see what his son had taken up to the attic The youths library was plainly and rigidly classified so that one might tell at a glance the books or at least the kind of books which had been withdrawn On this occasion Mr Ward was astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the antiquarian beyond what had been previously removed was missing These new withdrawals were all modern items histories scientific treatises geographies manuals of literature philosophic works and certain contemporary newspapers and magazines It was a very curious shift from Charles Wards recent run of reading and the father paused in a growing vortex of perplexity and an engulfing sense of strangeness The strangeness was a very poignant sensation and almost clawed at his chest as he strove to see just what was wrong around him Something was indeed wrong and tangibly as well as spiritually so Ever since he had been in this room he had known that something was amiss and at last it dawned upon him what it was On the north wall rose still the ancient carved overmantel from the house in Olney Court but to the cracked and precariously restored oils of the large Curwen portrait disaster had come Time and unequal heating had done their work at last and at some time since the rooms last cleaning the worst had happened Peeling clear of the wood curling tighter and tighter and finally crumbling into small bits with what must have been malignly silent suddenness the portrait of Joseph Curwen had resigned forever its staring surveillance of the youth it so strangely resembled and now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust IV A Mutation and a Madness In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen more often than usual and was continually carrying books between his library and the attic laboratory His actions were quiet and rational but he had a furtive hunted look which his mother did not like and developed an incredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his demands upon the cook Dr Willett had been told of those Friday noises and happenings and on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with the youth in the library where the picture stared no more The interview was as always inconclusive but Willett is still ready to swear that the youth was sane and himself at the time He held out promises of an early revelation and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory elsewhere At the loss of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering his first enthusiasm over it but seemed to find something of positive humour in its sudden crumbling About the second week Charles began to be absent from the house for long periods and one day when good old black Hannah came to help with the spring cleaning she mentioned his frequent visits to the old house in Olney Court where he would come with a large valise and perform curious delvings in the cellar He was always very liberal to her and to old Asa but seemed more worried than he used to be which grieved her very much since she had watched him grow up from birth Another report of his doings came from Pawtuxet where some friends of the family saw him at a distance a surprising number of times He seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-house of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet and subsequent inquiries by Dr Willett at that place brought out the fact that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in river-bank along which he would walk toward the north usually not reappearing for a very long while Late in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the attic laboratory which brought a stern reproof from Mr Ward and a somewhat distracted promise of amendment from Charles It occurred one morning and seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversation noted on that turbulent Good Friday The youth was arguing or remonstrating hotly with himself for there suddenly burst forth a perfectly distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiated tones like alternate demands and denials which caused Mrs Ward to run upstairs and listen at the door She could hear no more than a fragment whose only plain words were must have it red for three months and upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once When Charles was later questioned by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of spheres of consciousness which only great skill could avoid but which he would try to transfer to other realms About the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred In the early evening there had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory upstairs and Mr Ward was on the point of investigating when it suddenly quieted down That midnight after the family had retired the butler was nightlocking the front door when according to his statement Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly and uncertainly at the foot of the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that he wished egress The youth spoke no word but the worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight of his fevered eyes and trembled causelessly He opened the door and young Ward went out but in the morning he presented his resignation to Mrs Ward There was he said something unholy in the glance Charles had fixed on him It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an honest person and he could not possibly stay another night Mrs Ward allowed the man to depart but she did not value his statement highly To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was quite ridiculous for as long as she had remained awake she had heard faint sounds from the laboratory above sounds as if of sobbing and pacing and of a sighing which told only of despairs profoundest depths Mrs Ward had grown used to listening for sounds in the night for the mystery of her son was fast driving all else from her mind The next evening much as on another evening nearly three months before Charles Ward seized the newspaper very early and accidentally lost the main section The matter was not recalled till later when Dr Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out missing links here and there In the Journal office he found the section which Charles had lost and marked two items as of possible significance They were as follows More Cemetery Delving It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart night watchman at the North Burial Ground that ghouls were again at work in the ancient portion of the cemetery The grave of Ezra Weeden who was born in  and died in  according to his uprooted and savagely splintered slate headstone was found excavated and rifled the work being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent tool-shed Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial all was gone except a few slivers of decayed wood There were no wheel tracks but the police have measured a single set of footprints which they found in the vicinity and which indicate the boots of a man of refinement Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered last March when a party in a motor truck were frightened away after making a deep excavation but Sergt Riley of the Second Station discounts this theory and points to vital differences in the two cases In March the digging had been in a spot where no grave was known but this time a well-marked and cared-for grave had been rifled with every evidence of deliberate purpose and with a conscious malignity expressed in the splintering of the slab which had been intact up to the day before Members of the Weeden family notified of the happening expressed their astonishment and regret and were wholly unable to think of any enemy who would care to violate the grave of their ancestor Hazard Weeden of  Angell Street recalls a family legend according to which Ezra Weeden was involved in some very peculiar circumstances not dishonourable to himself shortly before the Revolution but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly ignorant Inspector Cunningham has been assigned to the case and hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the near future Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about  am today by a phenomenal baying of dogs which seemed to centre near the river just north of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet The volume and quality of the howling were unusually odd according to most who heard it and Fred Lemdin night watchman at Rhodes declares it was mixed with something very like the shrieks of a man in mortal terror and agony A sharp and very brief thunderstorm which seemed to strike somewhere near the bank of the river put an end to the disturbance Strange and unpleasant odours probably from the oil tanks along the bay are popularly linked with this incident and may have had their share in exciting the dogs The aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted and all agreed in retrospect that he may have wished at this period to make some statement or confession from which sheer terror withheld him The morbid listening of his mother in the night brought out the fact that he made frequent sallies abroad under cover of darkness and most of the more academic alienists unite at present in charging him with the revolting cases of vampirism which the press so sensationally reported about this time but which have not yet been definitely traced to any known perpetrator These cases too recent and celebrated to need detailed mention involved victims of every age and type and seemed to cluster around two distinct localities the residential hill and the North End near the Ward home and the suburban districts across the Cranston line near Pawtuxet Both late wayfarers and sleepers with open windows were attacked and those who lived to tell the tale spoke unanimously of a lean lithe leaping monster with burning eyes which fastened its teeth in the throat or upper arm and feasted ravenously Dr Willett who refuses to date the madness of Charles Ward as far back as even this is cautious in attempting to explain these horrors He has he declares certain theories of his own and limits his positive statements to a peculiar kind of negation I will not he says state who or what I believe perpetrated these attacks and murders but I will declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them I have reason to be sure he was ignorant of the taste of blood as indeed his continued anaemic decline and increasing pallor prove better than any verbal argument Ward meddled with terrible things but he has paid for it and he was never a monster or a villain As for nowI dont like to think A change came and Im content to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it His soul did anyhow for that mad flesh that vanished from Waites hospital had another Willett speaks with authority for he was often at the Ward home attending Mrs Ward whose nerves had begun to snap under the strain Her nocturnal listening had bred some morbid hallucinations which she confided to the doctor with hesitancy and which he ridiculed in talking to her although they made him ponder deeply when alone These delusions always concerned the faint sounds which she fancied she heard in the attic laboratory and bedroom and emphasised the occurrence of muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible times Early in July Willett ordered Mrs Ward to Atlantic City for an indefinite recuperative sojourn and cautioned both Mr Ward and the haggard and elusive Charles to write her only cheering letters It is probably to this enforced and reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued sanity  Not long after his mothers departure Charles Ward began negotiating for the Pawtuxet bungalow It was a squalid little wooden edifice with a concrete garage perched high on the sparsely settled bank of the river slightly above Rhodes but for some odd reason the youth would have nothing else He gave the real-estate agencies no peace till one of them secured it for him at an exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner and as soon as it was vacant he took possession under cover of darkness transporting in a great closed van the entire contents of his attic laboratory including the books both weird and modern which he had borrowed from his study He had this van loaded in the black small hours and his father recalls only a drowsy realisation of stifled oaths and stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away After that Charles moved back to his own old quarters on the third floor and never haunted the attic again To the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with which he had surrounded his attic realm save that he now appeared to have two sharers of his mysteries a villainous-looking Portuguese half-caste from the South Main St waterfront who acted as a servant and a thin scholarly stranger with dark glasses and a stubbly full beard of dyed aspect whose status was evidently that of a colleague Neighbours vainly tried to engage these odd persons in conversation The mulatto Gomes spoke very little English and the bearded man who gave his name as Dr Allen voluntarily followed his example Ward himself tried to be more affable but succeeded only in provoking curiosity with his rambling accounts of chemical research Before long queer tales began to circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights and somewhat later after this burning had suddenly ceased there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate orders of meat from the butchers and of the muffled shouting declamation rhythmic chanting and screaming supposed to come from some very deep cellar below the place Most distinctly the new and strange household was bitterly disliked by the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity and it is not remarkable that dark hints were advanced connecting the hated establishment with the current epidemic of vampiristic attacks and murders especially since the radius of that plague seemed now confined wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of Edgewood Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow but slept occasionally at home and was still reckoned a dweller beneath his fathers roof Twice he was absent from the city on week-long trips whose destinations have not yet been discovered He grew steadily paler and more emaciated even than before and lacked some of his former assurance when repeating to Dr Willett his old old story of vital research and future revelations Willett often waylaid him at his fathers house for the elder Ward was deeply worried and perplexed and wished his son to get as much sound oversight as could be managed in the case of so secretive and independent an adult The doctor still insists that the youth was sane even as late as this and adduces many a conversation to prove his point About September the vampirism declined but in the following January Ward almost became involved in serious trouble For some time the nocturnal arrival and departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet bungalow had been commented upon and at this juncture an unforeseen hitch exposed the nature of at least one item of their contents In a lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent sordid waylayings of trucks by hi-jackers in quest of liquor shipments but this time the robbers had been destined to receive the greater shock For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain some exceedingly gruesome things so gruesome in fact that the matter could not be kept quiet amongst the denizens of the underworld The thieves had hastily buried what they discovered but when the State Police got wind of the matter a careful search was made A recently arrested vagrant under promise of immunity from prosecution on any additional charge at last consented to guide a party of troopers to the spot and there was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and shameful thing It would not be well for the nationalor even the internationalsense of decorum if the public were ever to know what was uncovered by that awestruck party There was no mistaking it even by these far from studious officers and telegrams to Washington ensued with feverish rapidity The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow and State and Federal officials at once paid him a very forceful and serious call They found him pallid and worried with his two odd companions and received from him what seemed to be a valid explanation and evidence of innocence He had needed certain anatomical specimens as part of a programme of research whose depth and genuineness anyone who had known him in the last decade could prove and had ordered the required kind and number from agencies which he had thought as reasonably legitimate as such things can be Of the identity of the specimens he had known absolutely nothing and was properly shocked when the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on public sentiment and national dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce In this statement he was firmly sustained by his bearded colleague Dr Allen whose oddly hollow voice carried even more conviction than his own nervous tones so that in the end the officials took no action but carefully set down the New York name and address which Ward gave them as a basis for a search which came to nothing It is only fair to add that the specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their proper places and that the general public will never know of their blasphemous disturbance On February   Dr Willett received a letter from Charles Ward which he considers of extraordinary importance and about which he has frequently quarrelled with Dr Lyman Lyman believes that this note contains positive proof of a well-developed case of dementia praecox but Willett on the other hand regards it as the last perfectly sane utterance of the hapless youth He calls especial attention to the normal character of the penmanship which though shewing traces of shattered nerves is nevertheless distinctly Wards own The text in full is as follows  Prospect St Providence RI February   Dear Dr Willett I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the disclosures which I have so long promised you and for which you have pressed me so often The patience you have shewn in waiting and the confidence you have shewn in my mind and integrity are things I shall never cease to appreciate And now that I am ready to speak I must own with humiliation that no triumph such as I dreamed of can ever be mine Instead of triumph I have found terror and my talk with you will not be a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both myself and the world from a horror beyond all human conception or calculation You recall what those Fenner letters said of the old raiding party at Pawtuxet That must all be done again and quickly Upon us depends more than can be put into wordsall civilisation all natural law perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality but I did it for the sake of knowledge Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again I have left that Pawtuxet place forever and we must extirpate everything existing there alive or dead I shall not go there again and you must not believe it if you ever hear that I am there I will tell you why I say this when I see you I have come home for good and wish you would call on me at the very first moment that you can spare five or six hours continuously to hear what I have to say It will take that longand believe me when I tell you that you never had a more genuine professional duty than this My life and reason are the very least things which hang in the balance I dare not tell my father for he could not grasp the whole thing But I have told him of my danger and he has four men from a detective agency watching the house I dont know how much good they can do for they have against them forces which even you could scarcely envisage or acknowledge So come quickly if you wish to see me alive and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from stark hell Any time will doI shall not be out of the house Dont telephone ahead for there is no telling who or what may try to intercept you And let us pray to whatever gods there be that nothing may prevent this meeting In utmost gravity and desperation Charles Dexter Ward PS Shoot Dr Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid Dont burn it Dr Willett received this note about  am and immediately arranged to spare the whole late afternoon and evening for the momentous talk letting it extend on into the night as long as might be necessary He planned to arrive about four oclock and through all the intervening hours was so engulfed in every sort of wild speculation that most of his tasks were very mechanically performed Maniacal as the letter would have sounded to a stranger Willett had seen too much of Charles Wards oddities to dismiss it as sheer raving That something very subtle ancient and horrible was hovering about he felt quite sure and the reference to Dr Allen could almost be comprehended in view of what Pawtuxet gossip said of Wards enigmatical colleague Willett had never seen the man but had heard much of his aspect and bearing and could not but wonder what sort of eyes those much-discussed dark glasses might conceal Promptly at four Dr Willett presented himself at the Ward residence but found to his annoyance that Charles had not adhered to his determination to remain indoors The guards were there but said that the young man seemed to have lost part of his timidity He had that morning done much apparently frightened arguing and protesting over the telephone one of the detectives said replying to some unknown voice with phrases such as I am very tired and must rest a while I cant receive anyone for some time youll have to excuse me Please postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort of compromise or I am very sorry but I must take a complete vacation from everything Ill talk with you later Then apparently gaining boldness through meditation he had slipped out so quietly that no one had seen him depart or knew that he had gone until he returned about one oclock and entered the house without a word He had gone upstairs where a bit of his fear must have surged back for he was heard to cry out in a highly terrified fashion upon entering his library afterward trailing off into a kind of choking gasp When however the butler had gone to inquire what the trouble was he had appeared at the door with a great show of boldness and had silently gestured the man away in a manner that terrified him unaccountably Then he had evidently done some rearranging of his shelves for a great clattering and thumping and creaking ensued after which he had reappeared and left at once Willett inquired whether or not any message had been left but was told that there was none The butler seemed queerly disturbed about something in Charless appearance and manner and asked solicitously if there was much hope for a cure of his disordered nerves For almost two hours Dr Willett waited vainly in Charles Wards library watching the dusty shelves with their wide gaps where books had been removed and smiling grimly at the panelled overmantel on the north wall whence a year before the suave features of old Joseph Curwen had looked mildly down After a time the shadows began to gather and the sunset cheer gave place to a vague growing terror which flew shadow-like before the night Mr Ward finally arrived and shewed much surprise and anger at his sons absence after all the pains which had been taken to guard him He had not known of Charless appointment and promised to notify Willett when the youth returned In bidding the doctor goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at his sons condition and urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy to normal poise Willett was glad to escape from that library for something frightful and unholy seemed to haunt it as if the vanished picture had left behind a legacy of evil He had never liked that picture and even now strong-nerved though he was there lurked a quality in its vacant panel which made him feel an urgent need to get out into the pure air as soon as possible  The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward saying that Charles was still absent Mr Ward mentioned that Dr Allen had telephoned him to say that Charles would remain at Pawtuxet for some time and that he must not be disturbed This was necessary because Allen himself was suddenly called away for an indefinite period leaving the researches in need of Charless constant oversight Charles sent his best wishes and regretted any bother his abrupt change of plans might have caused In listening to this message Mr Ward heard Dr Allens voice for the first time and it seemed to excite some vague and elusive memory which could not be actually placed but which was disturbing to the point of fearfulness Faced by these baffling and contradictory reports Dr Willett was frankly at a loss what to do The frantic earnestness of Charless note was not to be denied yet what could one think of its writers immediate violation of his own expressed policy Young Ward had written that his delvings had become blasphemous and menacing that they and his bearded colleague must be extirpated at any cost and that he himself would never return to their final scene yet according to latest advices he had forgotten all this and was back in the thick of the mystery Common sense bade one leave the youth alone with his freakishness yet some deeper instinct would not permit the impression of that frenzied letter to subside Willett read it over again and could not make its essence sound as empty and insane as both its bombastic verbiage and its lack of fulfilment would seem to imply Its terror was too profound and real and in conjunction with what the doctor already knew evoked too vivid hints of monstrosities from beyond time and space to permit of any cynical explanation There were nameless horrors abroad and no matter how little one might be able to get at them one ought to stand prepared for any sort of action at any time For over a week Dr Willett pondered on the dilemma which seemed thrust upon him and became more and more inclined to pay Charles a call at the Pawtuxet bungalow No friend of the youth had ever ventured to storm this forbidden retreat and even his father knew of its interior only from such descriptions as he chose to give but Willett felt that some direct conversation with his patient was necessary Mr Ward had been receiving brief and non-committal typed notes from his son and said that Mrs Ward in her Atlantic City retirement had had no better word So at length the doctor resolved to act and despite a curious sensation inspired by old legends of Joseph Curwen and by more recent revelations and warnings from Charles Ward set boldly out for the bungalow on the bluff above the river Willett had visited the spot before through sheer curiosity though of course never entering the house or proclaiming his presence hence knew exactly the route to take Driving out Broad Street one early afternoon toward the end of February in his small motor he thought oddly of the grim party which had taken that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven years before on a terrible errand which none might ever comprehend The ride through the citys decaying fringe was short and trim Edgewood and sleepy Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead Willett turned to the right down Lockwood Street and drove his car as far along that rural road as he could then alighted and walked north to where the bluff towered above the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of misty downlands beyond Houses were still few here and there was no mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on a high point of land at his left Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel walk he rapped at the door with a firm hand and spoke without a tremor to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack He must he said see Charles Ward at once on vitally important business No excuse would be accepted and a repulse would mean only a full report of the matter to the elder Ward The mulatto still hesitated and pushed against the door when Willett attempted to open it but the doctor merely raised his voice and renewed his demands Then there came from the dark interior a husky whisper which somehow chilled the hearer through and through though he did not know why he feared it Let him in Tony it said we may as well talk now as ever But disturbing as was the whisper the greater fear was that which immediately followed The floor creaked and the speaker hove in sightand the owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be no other than Charles Dexter Ward The minuteness with which Dr Willett recalled and recorded his conversation of that afternoon is due to the importance he assigns to this particular period For at last he concedes a vital change in Charles Dexter Wards mentality and believes that the youth now spoke from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose growth he had watched for six and twenty years Controversy with Dr Lyman has compelled him to be very specific and he definitely dates the madness of Charles Ward from the time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents Those notes are not in Wards normal style not even in the style of that last frantic letter to Willett Instead they are strange and archaic as if the snapping of the writers mind had released a flood of tendencies and impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhood antiquarianism There is an obvious effort to be modern but the spirit and occasionally the language are those of the past The past too was evident in Wards every tone and gesture as he received the doctor in that shadowy bungalow He bowed motioned Willett to a seat and began to speak abruptly in that strange whisper which he sought to explain at the very outset I am grown phthisical he began from this cursed river air You must excuse my speech I suppose you are come from my father to see what ails me and I hope you will say nothing to alarm him Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care but studying even more closely the face of the speaker Something he felt was wrong and he thought of what the family had told him about the fright of that Yorkshire butler one night He wished it were not so dark but did not request that any blind be opened Instead he merely asked Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of little more than a week before I was coming to that the host replied You must know I am in a very bad state of nerves and do and say queer things I cannot account for As I have told you often I am on the edge of great matters and the bigness of them has a way of making me light-headed Any man might well be frighted of what I have found but I am not to be put off for long I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at home for having gone this far my place is here I am not well spoke of by my prying neighbours and perhaps I was led by weakness to believe myself what they say of me There is no evil to any in what I do so long as I do it rightly Have the goodness to wait six months and Ill shew you what will pay your patience well You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things surer than books and Ill leave you to judge the importance of what I can give to history philosophy and the arts by reason of the doors I have access to My ancestor had all this when those witless peeping Toms came and murdered him I now have it again or am coming very imperfectly to have a part of it This time nothing must happen and least of all through any idiot fears of my own Pray forget all I writ you Sir and have no fear of this place or any in it Dr Allen is a man of fine parts and I owe him an apology for anything ill I have said of him I wish I had no need to spare him but there were things he had to do elsewhere His zeal is equal to mine in all those matters and I suppose that when I feared the work I feared him too as my greatest helper in it Ward paused and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think He felt almost foolish in the face of this calm repudiation of the letter and yet there clung to him the fact that while the present discourse was strange and alien and indubitably mad the note itself had been tragic in its naturalness and likeness to the Charles Ward he knew Willett now tried to turn the talk on early matters and recall to the youth some past events which would restore a familiar mood but in this process he obtained only the most grotesque results It was the same with all the alienists later on Important sections of Charles Wards store of mental images mainly those touching modern times and his own personal life had been unaccountably expunged whilst all the massed antiquarianism of his youth had welled up from some profound subconsciousness to engulf the contemporary and the individual The youths intimate knowledge of elder things was abnormal and unholy and he tried his best to hide it When Willett would mention some favourite object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often shed by pure accident such a light as no normal mortal could conceivably be expected to possess and the doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glided by It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriffs wig fell off as he leaned over at the play in Mr Douglass Histrionick Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February  which fell on a Thursday or about how the actors cut the text of Steeles Conscious Lovers so badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-ridden legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later That Thomas Sabins Boston coach was damnd uncomfortable old letters may well have told but what healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olneys new signboard the gaudy crown he set up after he took to calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House was exactly like the first few notes of the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing Ward however would not be quizzed long in this vein Modern and personal topics he waved aside quite summarily whilst regarding antique affairs he soon shewed the plainest boredom What he wished clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough to make him depart without the intention of returning To this end he offered to shew Willett the entire house and at once proceeded to lead the doctor through every room from cellar to attic Willett looked sharply but noted that the visible books were far too few and trivial ever to have filled the wide gaps on Wards shelves at home and that the meagre so-called laboratory was the flimsiest sort of a blind Clearly there were a library and a laboratory elsewhere but just where it was impossible to say Essentially defeated in his quest for something he could not name Willett returned to town before evening and told the senior Ward everything which had occurred They agreed that the youth must be definitely out of his mind but decided that nothing drastic need be done just then Above all Mrs Ward must be kept in as complete an ignorance as her sons own strange typed notes would permit Mr Ward now determined to call in person upon his son making it wholly a surprise visit Dr Willett took him in his car one evening guiding him to within sight of the bungalow and waiting patiently for his return The session was a long one and the father emerged in a very saddened and perplexed state His reception had developed much like Willetts save that Charles had been an excessively long time in appearing after the visitor had forced his way into the hall and sent the Portuguese away with an imperative demand and in the bearing of the altered son there was no trace of filial affection The lights had been dim yet even so the youth had complained that they dazzled him outrageously He had not spoken out loud at all averring that his throat was in very poor condition but in his hoarse whisper there was a quality so vaguely disturbing that Mr Ward could not banish it from his mind Now definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youths mental salvation Mr Ward and Dr Willett set about collecting every scrap of data which the case might afford Pawtuxet gossip was the first item they studied and this was relatively easy to glean since both had friends in that region Dr Willett obtained the most rumours because people talked more frankly to him than to a parent of the central figure and from all he heard he could tell that young Wards life had become indeed a strange one Common tongues would not dissociate his household from the vampirism of the previous summer while the nocturnal comings and goings of the motor trucks provided their share of dark speculation Local tradesmen spoke of the queerness of the orders brought them by the evil-looking mulatto and in particular of the inordinate amounts of meat and fresh blood secured from the two butcher shops in the immediate neighbourhood For a household of only three these quantities were quite absurd Then there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth Reports of these things were harder to pin down but all the vague hints tallied in certain basic essentials Noises of a ritual nature positively existed and at times when the bungalow was dark They might of course have come from the known cellar but rumour insisted that there were deeper and more spreading crypts Recalling the ancient tales of Joseph Curwens catacombs and assuming for granted that the present bungalow had been selected because of its situation on the old Curwen site as revealed in one or another of the documents found behind the picture Willett and Mr Ward gave this phase of the gossip much attention and searched many times without success for the door in the river-bank which old manuscripts mentioned As to popular opinions of the bungalows various inhabitants it was soon plain that the Brava Portuguese was loathed the bearded and spectacled Dr Allen feared and the pallid young scholar disliked to a profound extent During the last week or two Ward had obviously changed much abandoning his attempts at affability and speaking only in hoarse but oddly repellent whispers on the few occasions that he ventured forth Such were the shreds and fragments gathered here and there and over these Mr Ward and Dr Willett held many long and serious conferences They strove to exercise deduction induction and constructive imagination to their utmost extent and to correlate every known fact of Charless later life including the frantic letter which the doctor now shewed the father with the meagre documentary evidence available concerning old Joseph Curwen They would have given much for a glimpse of the papers Charles had found for very clearly the key to the youths madness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard and his doings  And yet after all it was from no step of Mr Wards or Dr Willetts that the next move in this singular case proceeded The father and the physician rebuffed and confused by a shadow too shapeless and intangible to combat had rested uneasily on their oars while the typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer Then came the first of the month with its customary financial adjustments and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiar shaking of heads and telephoning from one to the other Officials who knew Charles Ward by sight went down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his appearing at this juncture was a clumsy forgery and were reassurred less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explained that his hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as to make normal writing impossible He could he said form no written characters at all except with great difficulty and could prove it by the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters even those to his father and mother who would bear out the assertion What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this circumstance alone for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally suspicious nor even the Pawtuxet gossip of which one or two of them had caught echoes It was the muddled discourse of the young man which nonplussed them implying as it did a virtually total loss of memory concerning important monetary matters which he had had at his fingertips only a month or two before Something was wrong for despite the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech there could be no normal reason for this ill-concealed blankness on vital points Moreover although none of these men knew Ward well they could not help observing the change in his language and manner They had heard he was an antiquarian but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make daily use of obsolete phraseology and gestures Altogether this combination of hoarseness palsied hands bad memory and altered speech and bearing must represent some disturbance or malady of genuine gravity which no doubt formed the basis of the prevailing odd rumours and after their departure the party of officials decided that a talk with the senior Ward was imperative So on the sixth of March  there was a long and serious conference in Mr Wards office after which the utterly bewildered father summoned Dr Willett in a kind of helpless resignation Willett looked over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheques and compared them in his mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note Certainly the change was radical and profound and yet there was something damnably familiar about the new writing It had crabbed and archaic tendencies of a very curious sort and seemed to result from a type of stroke utterly different from that which the youth had always used It was strangebut where had he seen it before On the whole it was obvious that Charles was insane Of that there could be no doubt And since it appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with the outside world much longer something must quickly be done toward his oversight and possible cure It was then that the alienists were called in Drs Peck and Waite of Providence and Dr Lyman of Boston to whom Mr Ward and Dr Willett gave the most exhaustive possible history of the case and who conferred at length in the now unused library of their young patient examining what books and papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of his habitual mental cast After scanning this material and examining the ominous note to Willett they all agreed that Charles Wards studies had been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary intellect and wished most heartily that they could see his more intimate volumes and documents but this latter they knew they could do if at all only after a scene at the bungalow itself Willett now reviewed the whole case with febrile energy it being at this time that he obtained the statements of the workmen who had seen Charles find the Curwen documents and that he collated the incidents of the destroyed newspaper items looking up the latter at the Journal office On Thursday the eighth of March Drs Willett Peck Lyman and Waite accompanied by Mr Ward paid the youth their momentous call making no concealment of their object and questioning the now acknowledged patient with extreme minuteness Charles though he was inordinately long in answering the summons and was still redolent of strange and noxious laboratory odours when he did finally make his agitated appearance proved a far from recalcitrant subject and admitted freely that his memory and balance had suffered somewhat from close application to abstruse studies He offered no resistance when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon and seemed indeed to display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory His conduct would have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently archaic trend of his speech and unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his consciousness marked him out as one definitely removed from the normal Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctors than he had formerly said to his family and to Dr Willett and his frantic note of the previous month he dismissed as mere nerves and hysteria He insisted that this shadowy bungalow possessed no library or laboratory beyond the visible ones and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of such odours as now saturated all his clothing Neighbourhood gossip he attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiosity Of the whereabouts of Dr Allen he said he did not feel at liberty to speak definitely but assured his inquisitors that the bearded and spectacled man would return when needed In paying off the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors and in closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets Ward shewed no sign of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to pause as though listening for something very faint He was apparently animated by a calmly philosophic resignation as if his removal were the merest transient incident which would cause the least trouble if facilitated and disposed of once and for all It was clear that he trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to overcome all the embarrassments into which his twisted memory his lost voice and handwriting and his secretive and eccentric behaviour had led him His mother it was agreed was not to be told of the change his father supplying typed notes in his name Ward was taken to the restfully and picturesquely situated private hospital maintained by Dr Waite on Conanicut Island in the bay and subjected to the closest scrutiny and questioning by all the physicians connected with the case It was then that the physical oddities were noticed the slackened metabolism the altered skin and the disproportionate neural reactions Dr Willett was the most perturbed of the various examiners for he had attended Ward all his life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his physical disorganisation Even the familiar olive mark on his hip was gone while on his chest was a great black mole or cicatrice which had never been there before and which made Willett wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the witch markings reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome nocturnal meetings in wild and lonely places The doctor could not keep his mind off a certain transcribed witch-trial record from Salem which Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive days and which read Mr G B on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S Jonathan A Simon O Deliverance W Joseph C Susan P Mehitable C and Deborah B Wards face too troubled him horribly till at length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified For above the young mans right eye was something which he had never previously noticeda small scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old Joseph Curwen and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both had submitted at a certain stage of their occult careers While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strict watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr Allen which Mr Ward had ordered delivered at the family home Willett had predicted that very little would be found since any communications of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger but in the latter part of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought It was in a very crabbed and archaic hand and though clearly not the effort of a foreigner shewed almost as singular a departure from modern English as the speech of young Ward himself It read Kleinstrasse  Altstadt Prague th Feby  Brother in Almousin-Metraton I this day receivd yr mention of what came up from the Salts I sent you It was wrong and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been changd when Barnabas gott me the Specimen It is often so as you must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye Kings Chapell ground in  and what H gott from Olde Buryg Point in  that was like to ende him I gott such a Thing in Aegypt  yeares gone from the which came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here in  As I told you longe ago do not calle up That which you can not put downe either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have Stones are all changd now in Nine groundes out of  You are never sure till you question I this day heard from H who has had Trouble with the Soldiers He is like to be sorry Transylvania is passd from Hungary to Roumania and woud change his Seat if the Castel werent so fulle of What we Knowe But of this he hath doubtless writ you In my next Sendg there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from ye East that will delight you greatly Meanwhile forget not I am desirous of B F if you can possibly get him for me You know G in Philada better than I Have him up firste if you will but doe not use him soe hard he will be Difficult for I must speake to him in ye End Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin Simon O To Mr J C in Providence Mr Ward and Dr Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit of unrelieved insanity Only by degrees did they absorb what it seemed to imply So the absent Dr Allen and not Charles Ward had come to be the leading spirit at Pawtuxet That must explain the wild reference and denunciation in the youths last frantic letter And what of this addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as Mr J C There was no escaping the inference but there are limits to possible monstrosity Who was Simon O the old man Ward had visited in Prague four years previously Perhaps but in the centuries behind there had been another Simon OSimon Orne alias Jedediah of Salem who vanished in  and whose peculiar handwriting Dr Willett now unmistakably recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne formulae which Charles had once shewn him What horrors and mysteries what contradictions and contraventions of Nature had come back after a century and a half to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires and domes The father and the old physician virtually at a loss what to do or think went to see Charles at the hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about Dr Allen about the Prague visit and about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem To all these inquiries the youth was politely non-committal merely barking in his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr Allen to have a remarkable spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past and that any correspondent the bearded man might have in Prague would probably be similarly gifted When they left Mr Ward and Dr Willett realised to their chagrin that they had really been the ones under catechism and that without imparting anything vital himself the confined youth had adroitly pumped them of everything the Prague letter had contained Drs Peck Waite and Lyman were not inclined to attach much importance to the strange correspondence of young Wards companion for they knew the tendency of kindred eccentrics and monomaniacs to band together and believed that Charles or Allen had merely unearthed an expatriated counterpartperhaps one who had seen Ornes handwriting and copied it in an attempt to pose as the bygone characters reincarnation Allen himself was perhaps a similar case and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen Such things had been known before and on the same basis the hard-headed doctors disposed of Willetts growing disquiet about Charles Wards present handwriting as studied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by various ruses Willett thought he had placed its odd familiarity at last and that what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship of old Joseph Curwen himself but this the other physicians regarded as a phase of imitativeness only to be expected in a mania of this sort and refused to grant it any importance either favourable or unfavourable Recognising this prosaic attitude in his colleagues Willett advised Mr Ward to keep to himself the letter which arrived for Dr Allen on the second of April from Rakus Transylvania in a handwriting so intensely and fundamentally like that of the Hutchinson cipher that both father and physician paused in awe before breaking the seal This read as follows Castle Ferenczy  March  Dear CHadd a Squad of  Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say Must digg deeper and have less Hearde These Roumanians plague me damnably being officious and particular where you coud buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and ffood Last monthe M got me ye Sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis where He whome I calld up sayd it woud be and I have hadde  Talkes with What was therein inhumd It will go to S O in Prague directly and thence to you It is stubborn but you know ye Way with Such You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before for there was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eatg off their Heads and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble as you too welle knowe You can now move and worke elsewhere with no Killg Trouble if needful tho I hope no Thing will soon force you to so Bothersome a Course I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside for there was ever a Mortall Peril in it and you are sensible what it did when you askd Protection of One not disposd to give it You excel me in gettg ye fformulae so another may saye them with Success but Borellus fancyd it woud be so if just ye right Wordes were hadd Does ye Boy use em often I regret that he growes squeamish as I feard he woud when I hadde him here nigh  Monthes but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him You cant saye him down with ye fformula for that will Worke only upon such as ye other fformula hath calld up from Saltes but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol and Graves are not harde to digg nor Acids loth to burne O sayes you have promisd him B F I must have him after B goes to you soone and may he give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis Imploy care in what you calle up and beware of ye Boy It will be ripe in a yeares time to have up ye Legions from Underneath and then there are no Boundes to what shal be oures Have Confidence in what I saye for you knowe O and I have hadd these  yeares more than you to consulte these Matters in Nephren-Ka nai Hadoth Edw H For J Curwen Esq Providence But if Willett and Mr Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the alienists they did not refrain from acting upon it themselves No amount of learned sophistry could controvert the fact that the strangely bearded and spectacled Dr Allen of whom Charless frantic letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace was in close and sinister correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom Ward had visited in his travels and who plainly claimed to be survivals or avatars of Curwens old Salem colleagues that he was regarding himself as the reincarnation of Joseph Curwen and that he entertainedor was at least advised to entertainmurderous designs against a boy who could scarcely be other than Charles Ward There was organised horror afoot and no matter who had started it the missing Allen was by this time at the bottom of it Therefore thanking heaven that Charles was now safe in the hospital Mr Ward lost no time in engaging detectives to learn all they could of the cryptic bearded doctor finding whence he had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him and if possible discovering his current whereabouts Supplying the men with one of the bungalow keys which Charles yielded up he urged them to explore Allens vacant room which had been identified when the patients belongings had been packed obtaining what clues they could from any effects he might have left about Mr Ward talked with the detectives in his sons old library and they felt a marked relief when they left it at last for there seemed to hover about the place a vague aura of evil Perhaps it was what they had heard of the infamous old wizard whose picture had once stared from the panelled overmantel and perhaps it was something different and irrelevant but in any case they all half sensed an intangible miasma which centred in that carven vestige of an older dwelling and which at times almost rose to the intensity of a material emanation V A Nightmare and a Cataclysm And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its indelible mark of fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett and has added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth was even then far behind Dr Willett had conferred at length with Mr Ward and had come to an agreement with him on several points which both felt the alienists would ridicule There was they conceded a terrible movement alive in the world whose direct connexion with a necromancy even older than the Salem witchcraft could not be doubted That at least two living menand one other of whom they dared not thinkwere in absolute possession of minds or personalities which had functioned as early as  or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in the face of all known natural laws What these horrible creaturesand Charles Ward as wellwere doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which had filtered in upon the case They were robbing the tombs of all the ages including those of the worlds wisest and greatest men in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them A hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls whereby illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books and from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive either in the same body or different bodies and had evidently achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together There had it seems been some truth in chimerical old Borellus when he wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains certain Essential Saltes from which the shade of a long-dead living thing might be raised up There was a formula for evoking such a shade and another for putting it down and it had now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully One must be careful about evocations for the markers of old graves are not always accurate Willett and Mr Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to conclusion Thingspresences or voices of some sortcould be drawn down from unknown places as well as from the grave and in this process also one must be careful Joseph Curwen had indubitably evoked many forbidden things and as for Charleswhat might one think of him What forces outside the spheres had reached him from Joseph Curwens day and turned his mind on forgotten things He had been led to find certain directions and he had used them He had talked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with the creature in the mountains of Transylvania And he must have found the grave of Joseph Curwen at last That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night were too significant to overlook Then he had summoned something and it must have come That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday and those different tones in the locked attic laboratory What were they like with their depth and hollowness Was there not here some awful foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr Allen with his spectral bass Yes that was what Mr Ward had felt with vague horror in his single talk with the manif man it wereover the telephone What hellish consciousness or voice what morbid shade or presence had come to answer Charles Wards secret rites behind that locked door Those voices heard in argumentmust have it red for three monthsGood God Was not that just before the vampirism broke out The rifling of Ezra Weedens ancient grave and the cries later at Pawtuxetwhose mind had planned the vengeance and rediscovered the shunned seat of elder blasphemies And then the bungalow and the bearded stranger and the gossip and the fear The final madness of Charles neither father nor doctor could attempt to explain but they did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again and was following its ancient morbidities Was daemoniac possession in truth a possibility Allen had something to do with it and the detectives must find out more about one whose existence menaced the young mans life In the meantime since the existence of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow seemed virtually beyond dispute some effort must be made to find it Willett and Mr Ward conscious of the sceptical attitude of the alienists resolved during their final conference to undertake a joint secret exploration of unparalleled thoroughness and agreed to meet at the bungalow on the following morning with valises and with certain tools and accessories suited to architectural search and underground exploration The morning of April th dawned clear and both explorers were at the bungalow by ten oclock Mr Ward had the key and an entry and cursory survey were made From the disordered condition of Dr Allens room it was obvious that the detectives had been there before and the later searchers hoped that they had found some clue which might prove of value Of course the main business lay in the cellar so thither they descended without much delay again making the circuit which each had vainly made before in the presence of the mad young owner For a time everything seemed baffling each inch of the earthen floor and stone walls having so solid and innocuous an aspect that the thought of a yawning aperture was scarcely to be entertained Willett reflected that since the original cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs beneath the beginning of the passage would represent the strictly modern delving of young Ward and his associates where they had probed for the ancient vaults whose rumour could have reached them by no wholesome means The doctor tried to put himself in Charless place to see how a delver would be likely to start but could not gain much inspiration from this method Then he decided on elimination as a policy and went carefully over the whole subterranean surface both vertical and horizontal trying to account for every inch separately He was soon substantially narrowed down and at last had nothing left but the small platform before the washtubs which he had tried once before in vain Now experimenting in every possible way and exerting a double strength he finally found that the top did indeed turn and slide horizontally on a corner pivot Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron manhole to which Mr Ward at once rushed with excited zeal The cover was not hard to lift and the father had quite removed it when Willett noticed the queerness of his aspect He was swaying and nodding dizzily and in the gust of noxious air which swept up from the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognised ample cause In a moment Dr Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above and was reviving him with cold water Mr Ward responded feebly but it could be seen that the mephitic blast from the crypt had in some way gravely sickened him Wishing to take no chances Willett hastened out to Broad Street for a taxicab and had soon dispatched the sufferer home despite his weak-voiced protests after which he produced an electric torch covered his nostrils with a band of sterile gauze and descended once more to peer into the new-found depths The foul air had now slightly abated and Willett was able to send a beam of light down the Stygian hole For about ten feet he saw it was a sheer cylindrical drop with concrete walls and an iron ladder after which the hole appeared to strike a flight of old stone steps which must originally have emerged to earth somewhat southwest of the present building  Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen legends kept him from climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf He could not help thinking of what Luke Fenner had reported on that last monstrous night Then duty asserted itself and he made the plunge carrying a great valise for the removal of whatever papers might prove of supreme importance Slowly as befitted one of his years he descended the ladder and reached the slimy steps below This was ancient masonry his torch told him and upon the dripping walls he saw the unwholesome moss of centuries Down down ran the steps not spirally but in three abrupt turns and with such narrowness that two men could have passed only with difficulty He had counted about thirty when a sound reached him very faintly and after that he did not feel disposed to count any more It was a godless sound one of those low-keyed insidious outrages of Nature which are not meant to be To call it a dull wail a doom-dragged whine or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones Was it for this that Ward had seemed to listen on that day he was removed It was the most shocking thing that Willett had ever heard and it continued from no determinate point as the doctor reached the bottom of the steps and cast his torchlight around on lofty corridor walls surmounted by Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black archways The hall in which he stood was perhaps fourteen feet high to the middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad Its pavement was of large chipped flagstones and its walls and roof were of dressed masonry Its length he could not imagine for it stretched ahead indefinitely into the blackness Of the archways some had doors of the old six-panelled colonial type whilst others had none Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling Willett began to explore these archways one by one finding beyond them rooms with groined stone ceilings each of medium size and apparently of bizarre uses Most of them had fireplaces the upper courses of whose chimneys would have formed an interesting study in engineering Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half in many cases evidently shattered as if by the ancient raiders For many of the chambers seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet and must have represented the earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwens experimentation Finally there came a room of obvious modernity or at least of recent occupancy There were oil heaters bookshelves and tables chairs and cabinets and a desk piled high with papers of varying antiquity and contemporaneousness Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several places and finding a match-safe handy Willett lighted such as were ready for use In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less than the latest study or library of Charles Ward Of the books the doctor had seen many before and a good part of the furniture had plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion Here and there was a piece well known to Willett and the sense of familiarity became so great that he half forgot the noisomeness and the wailing both of which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the steps His first duty as planned long ahead was to find and seize any papers which might seem of vital importance especially those portentous documents found by Charles so long ago behind the picture in Olney Court As he searched he perceived how stupendous a task the final unravelling would be for file on file was stuffed with papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs so that months or even years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and editing Once he found large packets of letters with Prague and Rakus postmarks and in writing clearly recognisable as Ornes and Hutchinsons all of which he took with him as part of the bundle to be removed in his valise At last in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home Willett found the batch of old Curwen papers recognising them from the reluctant glimpse Charles had granted him so many years ago The youth had evidently kept them together very much as they had been when first he found them since all the titles recalled by the workmen were present except the papers addressed to Orne and Hutchinson and the cipher with its key Willett placed the entire lot in his valise and continued his examination of the files Since young Wards immediate condition was the greatest matter at stake the closest searching was done among the most obviously recent matter and in this abundance of contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted The oddity was the slight amount in Charless normal writing which indeed included nothing more recent than two months before On the other hand there were literally reams of symbols and formulae historical notes and philosophical comment in a crabbed penmanship absolutely identical with the ancient script of Joseph Curwen though of undeniably modern dating Plainly a part of the latter-day programme had been a sedulous imitation of the old wizards writing which Charles seemed to have carried to a marvellous state of perfection Of any third hand which might have been Allens there was not a trace If he had indeed come to be the leader he must have forced young Ward to act as his amanuensis In this new material one mystic formula or rather pair of formulae recurred so often that Willett had it by heart before he had half finished his quest It consisted of two parallel columns the left-hand one surmounted by the archaic symbol called Dragons Head and used in almanacks to indicate the ascending node and the right-hand one headed by a corresponding sign of Dragons Tail or descending node The appearance of the whole was something like this and almost unconsciously the doctor realised that the second half was no more than the first written syllabically backward with the exception of the final monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth which he had come to recognise under various spellings from other things he had seen in connexion with this horrible matter The formulae were as followsexactly so as Willett is abundantly able to testifyand the first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable latent memory in his brain which he recognised later when reviewing the events of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year YAI NGNGAH YOG-SOTHOTH HEELGEB FAI THRODOG UAAAH OGTHROD AIF GEBLEEH YOG-SOTHOTH NGAHNG AIY ZHRO So haunting were these formulae and so frequently did he come upon them that before the doctor knew it he was repeating them under his breath Eventually however he felt he had secured all the papers he could digest to advantage for the present hence resolved to examine no more till he could bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an ampler and more systematic raid He had still to find the hidden laboratory so leaving his valise in the lighted room he emerged again into the black noisome corridor whose vaulting echoed ceaselessly with that dull and hideous whine The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned or filled only with crumbling boxes and ominous-looking leaden coffins but impressed him deeply with the magnitude of Joseph Curwens original operations He thought of the slaves and seamen who had disappeared of the graves which had been violated in every part of the world and of what that final raiding party must have seen and then he decided it was better not to think any more Once a great stone staircase mounted at his right and he deduced that this must have reached to one of the Curwen outbuildingsperhaps the famous stone edifice with the high slit-like windowsprovided the steps he had descended had led from the steep-roofed farmhouse Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead and the stench and the wailing grew stronger Willett saw that he had come upon a vast open space so great that his torchlight would not carry across it and as he advanced he encountered occasional stout pillars supporting the arches of the roof After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths of Stonehenge with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre and so curious were the carvings on that altar that he approached to study them with his electric light But when he saw what they were he shrank away shuddering and did not stop to investigate the dark stains which discoloured the upper surface and had spread down the sides in occasional thin lines Instead he found the distant wall and traced it as it swept round in a gigantic circle perforated by occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of shallow cells with iron gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains fastened to the stone of the concave rear masonry These cells were empty but still the horrible odour and the dismal moaning continued more insistent now than ever and seemingly varied at times by a sort of slippery thumping  From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willetts attention could no longer be diverted Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall than anywhere else and carried a vague impression of being far below even in this dark nether world of subterrene mystery Before trying any of the black archways for steps leading further down the doctor cast his beam of light about the stone-flagged floor It was very loosely paved and at irregular intervals there would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in no definite arrangement while at one point there lay a very long ladder carelessly flung down To this ladder singularly enough appeared to cling a particularly large amount of the frightful odour which encompassed everything As he walked slowly about it suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odour seemed strongest directly above the oddly pierced slabs as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down to some still deeper region of horror Kneeling by one he worked at it with his hands and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge it At his touch the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key and only with vast trepidation did he persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone A stench unnamable now rose up from below and the doctors head reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of gaping blackness If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate abomination Willett was destined to be disappointed for amidst that foetor and cracked whining he discerned only the brick-faced top of a cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and devoid of any ladder or other means of descent As the light shone down the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible yelps in conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind futile scrambling and slippery thumping The explorer trembled unwilling even to imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in that abyss but in a moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink lying at full length and holding the torch downward at arms length to see what might lie below For a second he could distinguish nothing but the slimy moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into that half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished frenzy and then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily and frantically up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft which must have been from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor where he lay The torch shook in his hand but he looked again to see what manner of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that unnatural well left starving by young Ward through all the long month since the doctors had taken him away and clearly only one of a vast number prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so thickly studded in the floor of the great vaulted cavern Whatever the things were they could not lie down in their cramped spaces but must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all those hideous weeks since their master had abandoned them unheeded But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again for surgeon and veteran of the dissecting-room though he was he has not been the same since It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and change a man and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinkers perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision In that second look Willett saw such an outline or entity for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr Waites private hospital He dropped the electric torch from a hand drained of muscular power or nervous cordination nor heeded the sound of crunching teeth which told of its fate at the bottom of the pit He screamed and screamed and screamed in a voice whose falsetto panic no acquaintance of his would ever have recognised and though he could not rise to his feet he crawled and rolled desperately away over the damp pavement where dozens of Tartarean wells poured forth their exhausted whining and yelping to answer his own insane cries He tore his hands on the rough loose stones and many times bruised his head against the frequent pillars but still he kept on Then at last he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness and stench and stopped his ears against the droning wail into which the burst of yelping had subsided He was drenched with perspiration and without means of producing a light stricken and unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror and crushed with a memory he never could efface Beneath him dozens of those things still lived and from one of the shafts the cover was removed He knew that what he had seen could never climb up the slippery walls yet shuddered at the thought that some obscure foot-hold might exist What the thing was he would never tell It was like some of the carvings on the hellish altar but it was alive Nature had never made it in this form for it was too palpably unfinished The deficiencies were of the most surprising sort and the abnormalities of proportion could not be described Willett consents only to say that this type of thing must have represented entities which Ward called up from imperfect salts and which he kept for servile or ritualistic purposes If it had not had a certain significance its image would not have been carved on that damnable stone It was not the worst thing depicted on that stonebut Willett never opened the other pits At the time the first connected idea in his mind was an idle paragraph from some of the old Curwen data he had digested long before a phrase used by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated letter to the bygone sorcerer Certainely there was Nothg butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H raisd upp from What he coud gather onlie a part of Then horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image there came a recollection of those ancient lingering rumours anent the burned twisted thing found in the fields a week after the Curwen raid Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of that object that it was neither thoroughly human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about These words hummed in the doctors mind as he rocked to and fro squatting on the nitrous stone floor He tried to drive them out and repeated the Lords Prayer to himself eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Land of Mr T S Eliot and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had lately found in Wards underground library Yai ngngah Yog-Sothoth and so on till the final underlined Zhro It seemed to soothe him and he staggered to his feet after a time lamenting bitterly his fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air Think he would not but he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint or reflection of the bright illumination he had left in the library After a while he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow infinitely far away and toward this he crawled in agonised caution on hands and knees amidst the stench and howling always feeling ahead lest he collide with the numerous great pillars or stumble into the abominable pit he had uncovered Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps leading to the hellish altar and from this spot he recoiled in loathing At another time he encountered the pierced slab he had removed and here his caution became almost pitiful But he did not come upon the dread aperture after all nor did anything issue from that aperture to detain him What had been down there made no sound nor stir Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had not been good for it Each time Willetts fingers felt a perforated slab he trembled His passage over it would sometimes increase the groaning below but generally it would produce no effect at all since he moved very noiselessly Several times during his progress the glow ahead diminished perceptibly and he realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must be expiring one by one The thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this underground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and run which he could safely do now that he had passed the open pit for he knew that once the light failed his only hope of rescue and survival would lie in whatever relief party Mr Ward might send after missing him for a sufficient period Presently however he emerged from the open space into the narrower corridor and definitely located the glow as coming from a door on his right In a moment he had reached it and was standing once more in young Wards secret library trembling with relief and watching the sputterings of that last lamp which had brought him to safety  In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an oil supply he had previously noticed and when the room was bright again he looked about to see if he might find a lantern for further exploration For racked though he was with horror his sense of grim purpose was still uppermost and he was firmly determined to leave no stone unturned in his search for the hideous facts behind Charles Wards bizarre madness Failing to find a lantern he chose the smallest of the lamps to carry also filling his pockets with candles and matches and taking with him a gallon can of oil which he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he might uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless covered wells To traverse that space again would require his utmost fortitude but he knew it must be done Fortunately neither the frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the vast cell-indented wall which bounded the cavern area and whose black mysterious archways would form the next goals of a logical search So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and anguished howling turning down his lamp to avoid any distant glimpse of the hellish altar or of the uncovered pit with the pierced stone slab beside it Most of the black doorways led merely to small chambers some vacant and some evidently used as storerooms and in several of the latter he saw some very curious accumulations of various objects One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales of spare clothing and the explorer thrilled when he saw that it was unmistakably the clothing of a century and a half before In another room he found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing as if gradual provisions were being made to equip a large body of men But what he disliked most of all were the huge copper vats which occasionally appeared these and the sinister incrustations upon them He liked them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose rims retained such obnoxious deposits and around which clung repellent odours perceptible above even the general noisomeness of the crypt When he had completed about half the entire circuit of the wall he found another corridor like that from which he had come and out of which many doors opened This he proceeded to investigate and after entering three rooms of medium size and of no significant contents he came at last to a large oblong apartment whose business-like tanks and tables furnaces and modern instruments occasional books and endless shelves of jars and bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of Charles Wardand no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before him After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready Dr Willett examined the place and all its appurtenances with the keenest interest noting from the relative quantities of various reagents on the shelves that young Wards dominant concern must have been with some branch of organic chemistry On the whole little could be learned from the scientific ensemble which included a gruesome-looking dissecting table so that the room was really rather a disappointment Among the books was a tattered old copy of Borellus in black-letter and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had underlined the same passage whose marking had so perturbed good Mr Merritt at Curwens farmhouse more than a century and a half before That older copy of course must have perished along with the rest of Curwens occult library in the final raid Three archways opened off the laboratory and these the doctor proceeded to sample in turn From his cursory survey he saw that two led merely to small storerooms but these he canvassed with care remarking the piles of coffins in various stages of damage and shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he could decipher There was much clothing also stored in these rooms and several new and tightly nailed boxes which he did not stop to investigate Most interesting of all perhaps were some odd bits which he judged to be fragments of old Joseph Curwens laboratory appliances These had suffered damage at the hands of the raiders but were still partly recognisable as the chemical paraphernalia of the Georgian period The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with shelves and having in the centre a table bearing two lamps These lamps Willett lighted and in their brilliant glow studied the endless shelving which surrounded him Some of the upper levels were wholly vacant but most of the space was filled with small odd-looking leaden jars of two general types one tall and without handles like a Grecian lekythos or oil-jug and the other with a single handle and proportioned like a Phaleron jug All had metal stoppers and were covered with peculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief In a moment the doctor noticed that these jugs were classified with great rigidity all the lekythoi being on one side of the room with a large wooden sign reading Custodes above them and all the Phalerons on the other correspondingly labelled with a sign reading Materia Each of the jars or jugs except some on the upper shelves that turned out to be vacant bore a cardboard tag with a number apparently referring to a catalogue and Willett resolved to look for the latter presently For the moment however he was more interested in the nature of the array as a whole and experimentally opened several of the lekythoi and Phalerons at random with a view to a rough generalisation The result was invariable Both types of jar contained a small quantity of a single kind of substance a fine dusty powder of very light weight and of many shades of dull neutral colour To the colours which formed the only point of variation there was no apparent method of disposal and no distinction between what occurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in the Phalerons A bluish-grey powder might be by the side of a pinkish-white one and any one in a Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in a lekythos The most individual feature about the powders was their non-adhesiveness Willett would pour one into his hand and upon returning it to its jug would find that no residue whatever remained on its palm The meaning of the two signs puzzled him and he wondered why this battery of chemicals was separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the laboratory proper Custodes Materia that was the Latin for Guards and Materials respectivelyand then there came a flash of memory as to where he had seen that word Guards before in connexion with this dreadful mystery It was of course in the recent letter to Dr Allen purporting to be from old Edward Hutchinson and the phrase had read There was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eatg off their Heads and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble as you too welle knowe What did this signify But waitwas there not still another reference to guards in this matter which he had failed wholly to recall when reading the Hutchinson letter Back in the old non-secretive days Ward had told him of the Eleazar Smith diary recording the spying of Smith and Weeden on the Curwen farm and in that dreadful chronicle there had been a mention of conversations overheard before the old wizard betook himself wholly beneath the earth There had been Smith and Weeden insisted terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen certain captives of his and the guards of those captives Those guards according to Hutchinson or his avatar had eaten their heads off so that now Dr Allen did not keep them in shape And if not in shape how save as the salts to which it appears this wizard band was engaged in reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could So that was what these lekythoi contained the monstrous fruit of unhallowed rites and deeds presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help when called up by some hellish incantation in the defence of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those who were not so willing Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been pouring in and out of his hands and for a moment felt an impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their silent and perhaps watching sentinels Then he thought of the Materiain the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room Salts tooand if not the salts of guards then the salts of what God Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note all civilisation all natural law perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands Then he noticed a small door at the farther end of the room and calmed himself enough to approach it and examine the crude sign chiselled above It was only a symbol but it filled him with vague spiritual dread for a morbid dreaming friend of his had once drawn it on paper and told him a few of the things it means in the dark abyss of sleep It was the sign of Koth that dreamers see fixed above the archway of a certain black tower standing alone in twilightand Willett did not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers But a moment later he forgot the sign as he recognised a new acrid odour in the stench-filled air This was a chemical rather than animal smell and came clearly from the room beyond the door And it was unmistakably the same odour which had saturated Charles Wards clothing on the day the doctors had taken him away So it was here that the youth had been interrupted by the final summons He was wiser than old Joseph Curwen for he had not resisted Willett boldly determined to penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm might contain seized the small lamp and crossed the threshold A wave of nameless fright rolled out to meet him but he yielded to no whim and deferred to no intuition There was nothing alive here to harm him and he would not be stayed in his piercing of the eldritch cloud which engulfed his patient The room beyond the door was of medium size and had no furniture save a table a single chair and two groups of curious machines with clamps and wheels which Willett recognised after a moment as mediaeval instruments of torture On one side of the door stood a rack of savage whips above which were some shelves bearing empty rows of shallow pedestalled cups of lead shaped like Grecian kylikes On the other side was the table with a powerful Argand lamp a pad and pencil and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves outside set down at irregular places as if temporarily or in haste Willett lighted the lamp and looked carefully at the pad to see what notes young Ward might have been jotting down when interrupted but found nothing more intelligible than the following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography which shed no light on the case as a whole B dyd not Escapd into walls and founde Place below Saw olde V saye ye Sabaoth and learnt ye Way Raisd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliverd F soughte to wipe out all knowg howe to raise Those from Outside As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall opposite the door between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners was covered with pegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white But far more interesting were the two vacant walls both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone The damp floor also bore marks of carving and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre with a plain circle about three feet wide half way between this and each corner In one of these four circles near where a yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down there stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on the shelves above the whip-rack and just outside the periphery was one of the Phaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room its tag numbered  This was unstoppered and proved upon inspection to be empty but the explorer saw with a shiver that the kylix was not Within its shallow area and saved from scattering only by the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern lay a small amount of a dry dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged in the jug and Willett almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he correlated little by little the several elements and antecedents of the scene The whips and the instruments of torture the dust or salts from the jug of Materia the two lekythoi from the Custodes shelf the robes the formulae on the walls the notes on the pad the hints from letters and legends and the thousand glimpses doubts and suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of Charles Wardall these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor With an effort however Willett pulled himself together and began studying the formulae chiselled on the walls From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious that they were carved in Joseph Curwens time and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the history of magic One the doctor clearly recognised as what Mrs Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before and what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs Ward had set it down from memory nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of Eliphas Levi but its identity was unmistakable and such words as Sabaoth Metraton Almousin and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the searcher who had seen and felt so much of cosmic abomination just around the corner This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room The right-hand wall was no less thickly inscribed and Willett felt a start of recognition as he came upon the pair of formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in the library They were roughly speaking the same with the ancient symbols of Dragons Head and Dragons Tail heading them as in Wards scribblings But the spelling differed quite widely from that of the modern versions as if old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound or as if later study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in question The doctor tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still ran persistently in his head and found it hard to do Where the script he had memorised began Yai ngngah Yog-Sothoth this epigraph started out as Aye engengah Yogge-Sothotha which to his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the second word Ground as the later text was into his consciousness the discrepancy disturbed him and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with the letters he found carved Weird and menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy rang his voice its accents keyed to a droning sing-song either through the spell of the past and the unknown or through the hellish example of that dull godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench and the darkness YAI NGNGAH YOG-SOTHOTH HEELGEB FAI THRODOG UAAAH But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very outset of the chant The lamps were sputtering woefully and the gloom grew so dense that the letters on the wall nearly faded from sight There was smoke too and an acrid odour which quite drowned out the stench from the far-away wells an odour like that he had smelt before yet infinitely stronger and more pungent He turned from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents and saw that the kylix on the floor in which the ominous efflorescent powder had lain was giving forth a cloud of thick greenish-black vapour of surprising volume and opacity That powderGreat God it had come from the shelf of Materiawhat was it doing now and what had started it The formula he had been chantingthe first of the pairDragons Head ascending nodeBlessed Saviour could it be    The doctor reeled and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps from all he had seen heard and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward I say to you againe doe not call up Any that you can not put downe    Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have    Three Talkes with What was therein inhumd    Mercy of Heaven what is that shape behind the parting smoke  Marinus Bicknell Willett has no hope that any part of his tale will be believed except by certain sympathetic friends hence he has made no attempt to tell it beyond his most intimate circle Only a few outsiders have ever heard it repeated and of these the majority laugh and remark that the doctor surely is getting old He has been advised to take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing with mental disturbance But Mr Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks only a horrible truth Did not he himself see the noisome aperture in the bungalow cellar Did not Willett send him home overcome and ill at eleven oclock that portentous morning Did he not telephone the doctor in vain that evening and again the next day and had he not driven to the bungalow itself on that following noon finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on one of the beds upstairs Willett had been breathing stertorously and opened his eyes slowly when Mr Ward gave him some brandy fetched from the car Then he shuddered and screamed crying out That beard    those eyes    God who are you A very strange thing to say to a trim blue-eyed clean-shaven gentleman whom he had known from the latters boyhood In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the previous morning Willetts clothing bore no disarrangement beyond certain smudges and worn places at the knees and only a faint acrid odour reminded Mr Ward of what he had smelt on his son that day he was taken to the hospital The doctors flashlight was missing but his valise was safely there as empty as when he had brought it Before indulging in any explanations and obviously with great moral effort Willett staggered dizzily down to the cellar and tried the fateful platform before the tubs It was unyielding Crossing to where he had left his yet unused tool satchel the day before he obtained a chisel and began to pry up the stubborn planks one by one Underneath the smooth concrete was still visible but of any opening or perforation there was no longer a trace Nothing yawned this time to sicken the mystified father who had followed the doctor downstairs only the smooth concrete underneath the planksno noisome well no world of subterrene horrors no secret library no Curwen papers no nightmare pits of stench and howling no laboratory or shelves or chiselled formulae no    Dr Willett turned pale and clutched at the younger man Yesterday he asked softly did you see it here    and smell it And when Mr Ward himself transfixed with dread and wonder found strength to nod an affirmative the physician gave a sound half a sigh and half a gasp and nodded in turn Then I will tell you he said So for an hour in the sunniest room they could find upstairs the physician whispered his frightful tale to the wondering father There was nothing to relate beyond the looming up of that form when the greenish-black vapour from the kylix parted and Willett was too tired to ask himself what had really occurred There were futile bewildered head-shakings from both men and once Mr Ward ventured a hushed suggestion Do you suppose it would be of any use to dig The doctor was silent for it seemed hardly fitting for any human brain to answer when powers of unknown spheres had so vitally encroached on this side of the Great Abyss Again Mr Ward asked But where did it go It brought you here you know and it sealed up the hole somehow And Willett again let silence answer for him But after all this was not the final phase of the matter Reaching for his handkerchief before rising to leave Dr Willetts fingers closed upon a piece of paper in his pocket which had not been there before and which was companioned by the candles and matches he had seized in the vanished vault It was a common sheet torn obviously from the cheap pad in that fabulous room of horror somewhere underground and the writing upon it was that of an ordinary lead pencildoubtless the one which had lain beside the pad It was folded very carelessly and beyond the faint acrid scent of the cryptic chamber bore no print or mark of any world but this But in the text itself it did indeed reek with wonder for here was no script of any wholesome age but the laboured strokes of mediaeval darkness scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it yet having combinations of symbols which seemed vaguely familiar The briefly scrawled message was this and its mystery lent purpose to the shaken pair who forthwith walked steadily out to the Ward car and gave orders to be driven first to a quiet dining place and then to the John Hay Library on the hill At the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography and over these the two men puzzled till the lights of evening shone out from the great chandelier In the end they found what was needed The letters were indeed no fantastic invention but the normal script of a very dark period They were the pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century AD and brought with them memories of an uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faiths and ancient rites stirred stealthily and the pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins of Caerleon and Hexham and by the towers along Hadrians crumbling wall The words were in such Latin as a barbarous age might rememberCorvinus necandus est Cadaver aqua forti dissolvendum nec aliquid retinendum Tace ut poteswhich may roughly be translated Curwen must be killed The body must be dissolved in aqua fortis nor must anything be retained Keep silence as best you are able Willett and Mr Ward were mute and baffled They had met the unknown and found that they lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely believed they ought With Willett especially the capacity for receiving fresh impressions of awe was well-nigh exhausted and both men sat still and helpless till the closing of the library forced them to leave Then they drove listlessly to the Ward mansion in Prospect Street and talked to no purpose into the night The doctor rested toward morning but did not go home And he was still there Sunday noon when a telephone message came from the detectives who had been assigned to look up Dr Allen Mr Ward who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown answered the call in person and told the men to come up early the next day when he heard their report was almost ready Both Willett and he were glad that this phase of the matter was taking form for whatever the origin of the strange minuscule message it seemed certain that the Curwen who must be destroyed could be no other than the bearded and spectacled stranger Charles had feared this man and had said in the frantic note that he must be killed and dissolved in acid Allen moreover had been receiving letters from the strange wizards in Europe under the name of Curwen and palpably regarded himself as an avatar of the bygone necromancer And now from a fresh and unknown source had come a message saying that Curwen must be killed and dissolved in acid The linkage was too unmistakable to be factitious and besides was not Allen planning to murder young Ward upon the advice of the creature called Hutchinson Of course the letter they had seen had never reached the bearded stranger but from its text they could see that Allen had already formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too squeamish Without doubt Allen must be apprehended and even if the most drastic directions were not carried out he must be placed where he could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward That afternoon hoping against hope to extract some gleam of information anent the inmost mysteries from the only available one capable of giving it the father and the doctor went down the bay and called on young Charles at the hospital Simply and gravely Willett told him all he had found and noticed how pale he turned as each description made certain the truth of the discovery The physician employed as much dramatic effect as he could and watched for a wincing on Charless part when he approached the matter of the covered pits and the nameless hybrids within But Ward did not wince Willett paused and his voice grew indignant as he spoke of how the things were starving He taxed the youth with shocking inhumanity and shivered when only a sardonic laugh came in reply For Charles having dropped as useless his pretence that the crypt did not exist seemed to see some ghastly jest in this affair and chuckled hoarsely at something which amused him Then he whispered in accents doubly terrible because of the cracked voice he used Damn em they do eat but they dont need to Thats the rare part A month you say without food Lud Sir you be modest Dye know that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster Kill everything off would he Why damme he was half-deaf with the noise from Outside and never saw or heard aught from the wells He never dreamed they were there at all Devil take ye those cursed things have been howling down there ever since Curwen was done for a hundred and fifty-seven years gone But no more than this could Willett get from the youth Horrified yet almost convinced against his will he went on with his tale in the hope that some incident might startle his auditor out of the mad composure he maintained Looking at the youths face the doctor could not but feel a kind of terror at the changes which recent months had wrought Truly the boy had drawn down nameless horrors from the skies When the room with the formulae and the greenish dust was mentioned Charles shewed his first sign of animation A quizzical look overspread his face as he heard what Willett had read on the pad and he ventured the mild statement that those notes were old ones of no possible significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic But he added had you but known the words to bring up that which I had out in the cup you had not been here to tell me this Twas Number  and I conceive you would have shook had you looked it up in my list in tother room Twas never raised by me but I meant to have it up that day you came to invite me hither Then Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the greenish-black smoke which had arisen and as he did so he saw true fear dawn for the first time on Charles Wards face It came and you be here alive As Ward croaked the words his voice seemed almost to burst free of its trammels and sink to cavernous abysses of uncanny resonance Willett gifted with a flash of inspiration believed he saw the situation and wove into his reply a caution from a letter he remembered No  you say But dont forget that stones are all changed now in nine grounds out of ten You are never sure till you question And then without warning he drew forth the minuscule message and flashed it before the patients eyes He could have wished no stronger result for Charles Ward fainted forthwith All this conversation of course had been conducted with the greatest secrecy lest the resident alienists accuse the father and the physician of encouraging a madman in his delusions Unaided too Dr Willett and Mr Ward picked up the stricken youth and placed him on the couch In reviving the patient mumbled many times of some word which he must get to Orne and Hutchinson at once so when his consciousness seemed fully back the doctor told him that of those strange creatures at least one was his bitter enemy and had given Dr Allen advice for his assassination This revelation produced no visible effect and before it was made the visitors could see that their host had already the look of a hunted man After that he would converse no more so Willett and the father departed presently leaving behind a caution against the bearded Allen to which the youth only replied that this individual was very safely taken care of and could do no one any harm even if he wished This was said with an almost evil chuckle very painful to hear They did not worry about any communications Charles might indite to that monstrous pair in Europe since they knew that the hospital authorities seized all outgoing mail for censorship and would pass no wild or outr-looking missive There is however a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and Hutchinson if such indeed the exiled wizards were Moved by some vague presentiment amidst the horrors of that period Willett arranged with an international press-cutting bureau for accounts of notable current crimes and accidents in Prague and in eastern Transylvania and after six months believed that he had found two very significant things amongst the multifarious items he received and had translated One was the total wrecking of a house by night in the oldest quarter of Prague and the disappearance of the evil old man called Josef Nadek who had dwelt in it alone ever since anyone could remember The other was a titan explosion in the Transylvanian mountains east of Rakus and the utter extirpation with all its inmates of the ill-regarded Castle Ferenczy whose master was so badly spoken of by peasants and soldiery alike that he would shortly have been summoned to Bucharest for serious questioning had not this incident cut off a career already so long as to antedate all common memory Willett maintains that the hand which wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well and that while Curwen was left to him to dispose of the writer felt able to find and deal with Orne and Hutchinson itself Of what their fate may have been the doctor strives sedulously not to think  The following morning Dr Willett hastened to the Ward home to be present when the detectives arrived Allens destruction or imprisonmentor Curwens if one might regard the tacit claim to reincarnation as validhe felt must be accomplished at any cost and he communicated this conviction to Mr Ward as they sat waiting for the men to come They were downstairs this time for the upper parts of the house were beginning to be shunned because of a peculiar nauseousness which hung indefinitely about a nauseousness which the older servants connected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait At nine oclock the three detectives presented themselves and immediately delivered all that they had to say They had not regrettably enough located the Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished nor had they found the least trace of Dr Allens source or present whereabouts but they had managed to unearth a considerable number of local impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger Allen had struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being and there was an universal belief that his thick Vandyke beard was either dyed or falsea belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false beard together with a pair of dark glasses in his room at the fateful bungalow His voice Mr Ward could well testify from his one telephone conversation had a depth and hollowness that could not be forgotten and his glance seemed malign even through his smoked and horn-rimmed glasses One shopkeeper in the course of negotiations had seen a specimen of his handwriting and declared it was very queer and crabbed this being confirmed by pencilled notes of no clear meaning found in his room and identified by the merchant In connexion with the vampirism rumours of the preceding summer a majority of the gossips believed that Allen rather than Ward was the actual vampire Statements were also obtained from the officials who had visited the bungalow after the unpleasant incident of the motor truck robbery They had felt less of the sinister in Dr Allen but had recognised him as the dominant figure in the queer shadowy cottage The place had been too dark for them to observe him clearly but they would know him again if they saw him His beard had looked odd and they thought he had some slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye As for the detectives search of Allens room it yielded nothing definite save the beard and glasses and several pencilled notes in a crabbed writing which Willett at once saw was identical with that shared by the old Curwen manuscripts and by the voluminous recent notes of young Ward found in the vanished catacombs of horror Dr Willett and Mr Ward caught something of a profound subtle and insidious cosmic fear from this data as it was gradually unfolded and almost trembled in following up the vague mad thought which had simultaneously reached their minds The false beard and glassesthe crabbed Curwen penmanshipthe old portrait and its tiny scarand the altered youth in the hospital with such a scarthat deep hollow voice on the telephonewas it not of this that Mr Ward was reminded when his son barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now claimed to be reduced Who had ever seen Charles and Allen together Yes the officials had once but who later on Was it not when Allen left that Charles suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow CurwenAllenWardin what blasphemous and abominable fusion had two ages and two persons become involved That damnable resemblance of the picture to Charleshad it not used to stare and stare and follow the boy around the room with its eyes Why too did both Allen and Charles copy Joseph Curwens handwriting even when alone and off guard And then the frightful work of those peoplethe lost crypt of horrors that had aged the doctor overnight the starved monsters in the noisome pits the awful formula which had yielded such nameless results the message in minuscules found in Willetts pocket the papers and the letters and all the talk of graves and salts and discoverieswhither did everything lead In the end Mr Ward did the most sensible thing Steeling himself against any realisation of why he did it he gave the detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet shopkeepers as had seen the portentous Dr Allen That article was a photograph of his luckless son on which he now carefully drew in ink the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard which the men had brought from Allens room For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where fear and miasma were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the upstairs library leered and leered and leered Then the men returned Yes The altered photograph was a very passable likeness of Dr Allen Mr Ward turned pale and Willett wiped a suddenly dampened brow with his handkerchief AllenWardCurwenit was becoming too hideous for coherent thought What had the boy called out of the void and what had it done to him What really had happened from first to last Who was this Allen who sought to kill Charles as too squeamish and why had his destined victim said in the postscript to that frantic letter that he must be so completely obliterated in acid Why too had the minuscule message of whose origin no one dared think said that Curwen must be likewise obliterated What was the change and when had the final stage occurred That day when his frantic note was receivedhe had been nervous all the morning then there was an alteration He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in past the men hired to guard him That was the time when he was out But nohad he not cried out in terror as he entered his studythis very room What had he found there Or waitwhat had found him That simulacrum which brushed boldly in without having been seen to gowas that an alien shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure which had never gone out at all Had not the butler spoken of queer noises Willett rang for the man and asked him some low-toned questions It had surely enough been a bad business There had been noisesa cry a gasp a choking and a sort of clattering or creaking or thumping or all of these And Mr Charles was not the same when he stalked out without a word The butler shivered as he spoke and sniffed at the heavy air that blew down from some open window upstairs Terror had settled definitely upon the house and only the business-like detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of it Even they were restless for this case had held vague elements in the background which pleased them not at all Dr Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly and his thoughts were terrible ones Now and then he would almost break into muttering as he ran over in his head a new appalling and increasingly conclusive chain of nightmare happenings Then Mr Ward made a sign that the conference was over and everyone save him and the doctor left the room It was noon now but shadows as of coming night seemed to engulf the phantom-haunted mansion Willett began talking very seriously to his host and urged that he leave a great deal of the future investigation to him There would be he predicted certain obnoxious elements which a friend could bear better than a relative As family physician he must have a free hand and the first thing he required was a period alone and undisturbed in the abandoned library upstairs where the ancient overmantel had gathered about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when Joseph Curwens features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted panel Mr Ward dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably maddening suggestions that poured in upon him from every side could only acquiesce and half an hour later the doctor was locked in the shunned room with the panelling from Olney Court The father listening outside heard fumbling sounds of moving and rummaging as the moments passed and finally a wrench and a creak as if a tight cupboard door were being opened Then there was a muffled cry a kind of snorting choke and a hasty slamming of whatever had been opened Almost at once the key rattled and Willett appeared in the hall haggard and ghastly and demanding wood for the real fireplace on the south wall of the room The furnace was not enough he said and the electric log had little practical use Longing yet not daring to ask questions Mr Ward gave the requisite orders and a man brought some stout pine logs shuddering as he entered the tainted air of the library to place them in the grate Willett meanwhile had gone up to the dismantled laboratory and brought down a few odds and ends not included in the moving of the July before They were in a covered basket and Mr Ward never saw what they were Then the doctor locked himself in the library once more and by the clouds of smoke which rolled down past the windows from the chimney it was known that he had lighted the fire Later after a great rustling of newspapers that odd wrench and creaking were heard again followed by a thumping which none of the eavesdroppers liked Thereafter two suppressed cries of Willetts were heard and hard upon these came a swishing rustle of indefinable hatefulness Finally the smoke that the wind beat down from the chimney grew very dark and acrid and everyone wished that the weather had spared them this choking and venomous inundation of peculiar fumes Mr Wards head reeled and the servants all clustered together in a knot to watch the horrible black smoke swoop down After an age of waiting the vapours seemed to lighten and half-formless sounds of scraping sweeping and other minor operations were heard behind the bolted door And at last after the slamming of some cupboard within Willett made his appearancesad pale and haggard and bearing the cloth-draped basket he had taken from the upstairs laboratory He had left the window open and into that once accursed room was pouring a wealth of pure wholesome air to mix with a queer new smell of disinfectants The ancient overmantel still lingered but it seemed robbed of malignity now and rose as calm and stately in its white panelling as if it had never borne the picture of Joseph Curwen Night was coming on yet this time its shadows held no latent fright but only a gentle melancholy Of what he had done the doctor would never speak To Mr Ward he said I can answer no questions but I will say that there are different kinds of magic I have made a great purgation and those in this house will sleep the better for it  That Dr Willetts purgation had been an ordeal almost as nerve-racking in its way as his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt is shewn by the fact that the elderly physician gave out completely as soon as he reached home that evening For three days he rested constantly in his room though servants later muttered something about having heard him after midnight on Wednesday when the outer door softly opened and closed with phenomenal softness Servants imaginations fortunately are limited else comment might have been excited by an item in Thursdays Evening Bulletin which ran as follows North End GhoulsActive Again After a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the Weeden lot at the North Burial Ground a nocturnal prowler was glimpsed early this morning in the same cemetery by Robert Hart the night watchman Happening to glance for a moment from his shelter at about  am Hart observed the glow of a lantern or pocket torch not far to the northwest and upon opening the door detected the figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted against a nearby electric light At once starting in pursuit he saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance gaining the street and losing himself among the shadows before approach or capture was possible Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year this intruder had done no real damage before detection A vacant part of the Ward lot shewed signs of a little superficial digging but nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted and no previous grave had been disturbed Hart who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man probably having a full beard inclines to the view that all three of the digging incidents have a common source but police from the Second Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of the second incident where an ancient coffin was removed and its headstone violently shattered The first of the incidents in which it is thought an attempt to bury something was frustrated occurred a year ago last March and has been attributed to bootleggers seeking a cache It is possible says Sergt Riley that this third affair is of similar nature Officers at the Second Station are taking especial pains to capture the gang of miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages All day Thursday Dr Willett rested as if recuperating from something past or nerving himself for something to come In the evening he wrote a note to Mr Ward which was delivered the next morning and which caused the half-dazed parent to ponder long and deeply Mr Ward had not been able to go down to business since the shock of Monday with its baffling reports and its sinister purgation but he found something calming about the doctors letter in spite of the despair it seemed to promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed to evoke  Barnes St Providence RI April   Dear TheodoreI feel that I must say a word to you before doing what I am going to do tomorrow It will conclude the terrible business we have been going through for I feel that no spade is ever likely to reach that monstrous place we know of but Im afraid it wont set your mind at rest unless I expressly assure you how very conclusive it is You have known me ever since you were a small boy so I think you will not distrust me when I hint that some matters are best left undecided and unexplored It is better that you attempt no further speculation as to Charless case and almost imperative that you tell his mother nothing more than she already suspects When I call on you tomorrow Charles will have escaped That is all which need remain in anyones mind He was mad and he escaped You can tell his mother gently and gradually about the mad part when you stop sending the typed notes in his name Id advise you to join her in Atlantic City and take a rest yourself God knows you need one after this shock as I do myself I am going South for a while to calm down and brace up So dont ask me any questions when I call It may be that something will go wrong but Ill tell you if it does I dont think it will There will be nothing more to worry about for Charles will be very very safe He is nowsafer than you dream You need hold no fears about Allen and who or what he is He forms as much a part of the past as Joseph Curwens picture and when I ring your doorbell you may feel certain that there is no such person And what wrote that minuscule message will never trouble you or yours But you must steel yourself to melancholy and prepare your wife to do the same I must tell you frankly that Charless escape will not mean his restoration to you He has been afflicted with a peculiar disease as you must realise from the subtle physical as well as mental changes in him and you must not hope to see him again Have only this consolationthat he was never a fiend or even truly a madman but only an eager studious and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach and something came out of those years to engulf him And now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most of all For there will be indeed no uncertainty about Charless fate In about a year say you can if you wish devise a suitable account of the end for the boy will be no more You can put up a stone in your lot at the North Burial Ground exactly ten feet west of your fathers and facing the same way and that will mark the true resting-place of your son Nor need you fear that it will mark any abnormality or changeling The ashes in that grave will be those of your own unaltered bone and sinewof the real Charles Dexter Ward whose mind you watched from infancythe real Charles with the olive-mark on his hip and without the black witch-mark on his chest or the pit on his forehead The Charles who never did actual evil and who will have paid with his life for his squeamishness That is all Charles will have escaped and a year from now you can put up his stone Do not question me tomorrow And believe that the honour of your ancient family remains untainted now as it has been at all times in the past With profoundest sympathy and exhortations to fortitude calmness and resignation I am ever Sincerely your friend Marinus B Willett So on the morning of Friday April   Marinus Bicknell Willett visited the room of Charles Dexter Ward at Dr Waites private hospital on Conanicut Island The youth though making no attempt to evade his caller was in a sullen mood and seemed disinclined to open the conversation which Willett obviously desired The doctors discovery of the crypt and his monstrous experience therein had of course created a new source of embarrassment so that both hesitated perceptibly after the interchange of a few strained formalities Then a new element of constraint crept in as Ward seemed to read behind the doctors mask-like face a terrible purpose which had never been there before The patient quailed conscious that since the last visit there had been a change whereby the solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless and implacable avenger Ward actually turned pale and the doctor was the first to speak More he said has been found out and I must warn you fairly that a reckoning is due Digging again and coming upon more poor starving pets was the ironic reply It was evident that the youth meant to shew bravado to the last No Willett slowly rejoined this time I did not have to dig We have had men looking up Dr Allen and they found the false beard and spectacles in the bungalow Excellent commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily insulting and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now have on They would become you very well came the even and studied response as indeed they seem to have done As Willett said this it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over the sun though there was no change in the shadows on the floor Then Ward ventured And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning Suppose a man does find it now and then useful to be twofold No said Willett gravely again you are wrong It is no business of mine if any man seeks duality provided he has any right to exist at all and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space Ward now started violently Well Sir what have ye found and what dye want with me The doctor let a little time elapse before replying as if choosing his words for an effective answer I have found he finally intoned something in a cupboard behind an ancient overmantel where a picture once was and I have burned it and buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting Damn ye who did ye telland wholl believe it was he after these full two months with me alive What dye mean to do Willett though a small man actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture I have told no one This is no common caseit is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with Thank God some chance has left inside me the spark of imagination that I might not go astray in thinking out this thing You cannot deceive me Joseph Curwen for I know that your accursed magic is true I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on your double and descendant I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you up from your detestable grave I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studied modern things and roved abroad as a vampire by night and how you later shewed yourself in beard and glasses that no one might wonder at your godless likeness to him I know what you resolved to do when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the worlds tombs and at what you planned afterward and I know how you did it You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards around the house They thought it was he who went in and they thought it was he who came out when you had strangled and hidden him But you hadnt reckoned on the different contents of two minds You were a fool Curwen to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough Why didnt you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting It hasnt worked you see after all You know better than I who or what wrote that message in minuscules but I will warn you it was not written in vain There are abominations and blasphemies which must be stamped out and I believe that the writer of those words will attend to Orne and Hutchinson One of those creatures wrote you once do not call up any that you can not put down You were undone once before perhaps in that very way and it may be that your own evil magic will undo you all again Curwen a man cant tamper with Nature beyond certain limits and every horror you have woven will rise up to wipe you out But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature before him Hopelessly at bay weaponless and knowing that any show of physical violence would bring a score of attendants to the doctors rescue Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one ancient ally and began a series of cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep hollow voice now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness bellowed out the opening words of a terrible formula PER ADONAI ELOIM ADONAI JEHOVA ADONAI SABAOTH METRATON    But Willett was too quick for him Even as the dogs in the yard outside began to howl and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay the doctor commenced the solemn and measured intonation of that which he had meant all along to recite An eye for an eyemagic for magiclet the outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had been learned So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair of formulae whose first had raised the writer of those minusculesthe cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragons Tail sign of the descending node OGTHROD AIF GEBLEEH YOG-SOTHOTH NGAHNG AIY ZHRO At the very first word from Willetts mouth the previously commenced formula of the patient stopped short Unable to speak the monster made wild motions with his arms until they too were arrested When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered the hideous change began It was not merely a dissolution but rather a transformation or recapitulation and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the incantation could be pronounced But he did not faint and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets never troubled the world again The madness out of time had subsided and the case of Charles Dexter Ward was closed Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror Dr Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss There had as he had predicted been no need for acids For like his accursed picture a year before Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust