Chapter 3

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 demons,
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 mate's frightened description.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of
the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure
fright in that accursed instant. The Thing can not be described--there
is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy,
such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth
a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that
telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of
the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and
what an age-old cult had failed to do by 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 Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging
frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat,
and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which
shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as
if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and
pulled desperately for the _Alert_ as the mountainous monstrosity
flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of
the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure
of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments
of feverish rushing up and down between wheels and engines to get
the _Alert_ under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of 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 demon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came
nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on
relentlessly.

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

* * * * *

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

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

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