Chapter 2

From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up
at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a center hung,
head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who
had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshipers
jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from
left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the
ring of fire.

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

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief
duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a
hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their
firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five
minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild
blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in
the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners,
whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows
of policemen. Five of the worshipers 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 coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.
But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something
far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and
ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprizing consistency
to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshiped, 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 man,
who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the
prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in
distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when
the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of
R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the
secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

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

* * * * *

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

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

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether
of flesh and blood. They had shape--for did not this star-fashioned
image prove it?--but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars
were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky;
but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They
no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone
houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty
Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might
once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside
must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them
intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They
could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions
of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe,
for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked
in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came,
the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by molding 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 showed them; idols brought in dim eras
from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right
again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb
to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would
be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old
Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals
thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then
the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill
and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a
holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate
rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow
forth the prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R'lyeh,
with its monoliths and sepulchers, 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, moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors 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 center 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 eons even death may die."

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he
spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their
subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he showed
me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency
of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original
of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had
formed themselves 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 uncle's relentless catechism had let
fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in
which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me
see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green
stone--whose _geometry_, he oddly said, was _all wrong_--and hear
with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from
underground: "_Cthulhu fhtagn_," "_Cthulhu fhtagn_."

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

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

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

_3. The Madness from the Sea._

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

I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called
the "Cthulhu Cult," and was visiting a learned friend of Paterson,
New Jersey, the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note.
Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd
picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the
_Sydney Bulletin_ I have mentioned, for my friend has 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 Co.'s freighter _Vigilant_, bound from Valparaiso,
arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow
the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht _Alert_ of
Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21',
W. Longitude 152° 17', with one living and one dead man aboard.

The _Vigilant_ left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2d was
driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy
storms and monster waves. On April 12th 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 20th,
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 1st, and on March 22d, in S.
Latitude 49° 51´, W. Longitude 128° 34´, encountered the _Alert_,
manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes.
Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused;
whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without
warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what
a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of
data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests
at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to
order back the _Emma_ as they sailed about with their hideous idol?
What was the unknown island on which six of the _Emma's_ crew had
died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the
vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what was known of the
noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvelous 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 1st--our February 28th according to the International Date
Line--the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the _Alert_ and
her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned,
and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to
dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had
molded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the
crew of the _Emma_ landed on an unknown island and left six men dead;
and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened
vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit,
whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly
into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd--the date on which
all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from
the bondage of strange fever? What of all this--and of those hints of
old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign;
their faithful cult _and their mastery of dreams_? Was I tottering on
the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so, they
must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April
had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of
mankind's soul.

* * * * *

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

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

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and
members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the _Alert_, now sold and
in commercial use, 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 Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists,
the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed
that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of
what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: "They
had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them."

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty.
The _Emma_, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had
felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have
heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's dreams.
Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held
up by the _Alert_ on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as
he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends
on the _Alert_ he speaks with significant horror. There was some
peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction
seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous wonder at the charge
of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the
court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured
yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar
sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126°
43' come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean
masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of
earth's supreme terror--the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that
was built in measureless eons 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.