The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

  I was half way back to my makeshift bed in the parlor when the telephone rang again. Though it was not my ring, I turned back to it at once. The hour was now six-thirty, and the sun shone over the hill. It was Emma Whateley calling Lavinia Hough.

  “Vinnie, did ye hear ’em las’ night?”

  “Land sakes, yes! Emma, do you s’pose it means… ?”

  “I don’t know. It was suthin’ terrible the way they went on. Ain’t heered nuthin’ like it since Abel was aout in the woods las’ summer. Kept Willie and Mamie awake all night. It scares me, Vinnie.”

  “Me, too. Gawd, what if it starts again?”

  “Hush up, Vinnie. A body can’t tell who’s listenin’.”

  The telephone rang throughout the morning, and this was the topic of conversation. It was soon borne in upon me that it was the whippoorwills and their frenetic calling in the night which had excited the neighbors. I had thought it annoying, but it had not occurred to me to think it unusual. However, judging by what I overheard, it was not only unusual but ominous for the birds to call with such insistence. It was Hester Hutchins who put the superstitious fears of the neighbors into words, when she told about the whippoorwills to a cousin who had telephoned from Dunwich, some miles to the north.

  “The hills was a’talkin’ again las’ night, Cousin Flora,” she said in a kind of hushed but urgent voice. “Heard ’em all night long, couldn’t hardly sleep. Warn’t nuthin’ but whippoorwills, hundreds an’ hundreds of ’em all night long. Come from Harrop’s Pocket, but they was so loud they might’s well ’ve been up on the porch rail. They’re awaitin’ to ketch somebody’s soul, just the way they was when Benjy Wheeler died an’ sister Hough, an’ Curtis Begbie’s wife, Annie. I know, I know—they dun’t fool me none. Somebody’s a-goin’ to die—an’ soon, mark my words.”

  A strange superstition, surely, I thought. Nevertheless, that night, following a day too busy to permit of my making inquiries of the neighbors, I set myself to listening for the whippoorwills. I sat in the darkness at the study window, but there was scarcely any need for light, for a moon but three days from the full shone into the valley and filled it with that green-white light which is the peculiar property of moonlight. Long before darkness came into the valley, it had taken possession of the wooded hills enclosing it; and it was from the dark places in the woods that the first steady whippoorwill began to sound and recur. Previous to the voices of the whippoorwills there had been strangely few of the customary evening songs of birds; only a few nighthawks had appeared against the evening sky to spiral upward, crying shrilly, and plummet down in a breathtaking skycoast, making an odd zoom at the trough of the dive. But these were no longer visible or audible as the darkness fell, and one after another, the whippoorwills began to call.

  As darkness invaded the valley, the whippoorwills did likewise. Undeniably, the whippoorwills drifted down out of the hills on noiseless wings toward the house in which I sat. I saw the first one come, a dark object in the moonlight, to the roof of the woodshed; in a matter of moments, another bird followed, then another and another. Soon I saw them come to the ground between the sheds and the house, and I knew they were on the roof of the house itself. They occupied every roof, every fence-post. I counted over a hundred of them before I stopped counting, being unsure about their flight-patterns, since I observed some of them moving about from one place to another.

  Never once did their calling cease. I used to think that the call of the whippoorwill was a sweetly nostalgic sound, but never again. Surrounding the house, the birds made the most hellish cacophony conceivable; whereas the call of a whippoorwill heard from a distance is mellow and pleasant, the same call heard just outside the window is unbelievably harsh and noisy, a cross between a scream and an angry rattle. Multiplied by scores, the calls were truly maddening, grating on me to such an extent that after an hour of it, following the ordeal of the previous night, I took refuge in cotton stuffed into my ears. Even this afforded but temporary relief, but, with its help and the exhaustion I felt after the sleepless night just past, I was able to sleep after a fashion. My last thought before sleep overcame me was that I must go on about my business without delay, lest I be driven out of my mind by the ceaseless insistence of the whippoorwills which obviously meant to come down out of the hills every night in their season.

  I was awake before dawn; the soporific of sleep had worn off, but the whippoorwills had not ceased to call. I sat up on my couch, and presently got up to look out of the window. The birds were still there, though they had moved a little farther away from the house now, and were no longer quite so numerous. A faint hint of dawn shone in the east, and there, too, taking the place of the moon, which had gone down, shone the morning stars—the planet Mars, already well up the eastern heaven, with Venus and Jupiter, less than five degrees above the eastern rim, and glowing with supernal splendor.

  I dressed, made myself some breakfast, and for the first time stopped to look at the books my cousin Abel had gathered together. I had given a cursory glance at the open book on the table, but it meant nothing to me, since it appeared to be printed in a typeface which was an imitation of someone’s script, and was therefore scarcely legible. Moreover, it concerned alien matters, which seemed to me the veriest fancies of someone’s drug-ridden mind. My cousin’s other books, however, appeared to be of similar nature. A file of the Old Farmer’s Almanac stood out with welcome familiarity, but this alone was familiar. Though I was never a poorly-read man, I confess to a feeling of utter strangeness before my cousin’s library, if such it can be called.

  Yet a cursory examination of it filled me with a new respect for my cousin, for his abilities certainly exceeded my own in the matter of languages, if he had been able to read all the tomes he had collected. For they were in several languages, as their titles indicated, and most of them had no meaning for me at all. I remembered having vaguely heard of the Rev. Ward Phillips’ book, Thaumaturgical Prodigies in New-English Canaan, but of such books as the Cultes des Goules, by Comte d’Erlette, De Vermis Mysteriis, by Dr. Ludvig Prinn, Lully’s Ars Magna et Ultima, the Pnakotic Manuscript, the R’lyeh Text, Von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and many other similar titles, I had never heard. It did not occur to me, frankly, that these books might contain a key to my cousin’s disappearance, until later that day, when finally I did take time to make some attempt to see the neighbors, for the purpose of making inquiry among them in the hope of accomplishing more than the men from the sheriff’s office.

  I went first to the Giles place, which was approximately one mile up into the hills directly south of my cousin’s house. My reception was not encouraging. Abbey Giles, a tall, gaunt woman, saw me from the window, shaking her head, refused to come to the door. As I stood in the yard, wondering how I could convince her that I was not dangerous, Lem Giles came hurriedly from the barn; the belligerence of his gaze gave me pause.

  “What’re ye wantin’ here, Stranger?” he asked.

  Though he called me “stranger”, I felt that he knew me perfectly well. I introduced myself and explained that I was endeavoring to learn the truth about my cousin’s disappearance. Could he tell me anything about Abel?

  “Can’t tell ye ntin’” he said shortly. “Go ast the sheriff; I tol’ him everythin’ I got to say.”

  “I think people hereabouts know more than they are saying,” I said firmly.

  “Might be. But they ain’t sain’ it, and that’s a fact.”

  More than this I could not get out of Lem Giles. I went on to the Corey place, but no one was at home there; so I took a ridge path I was confident would lead me to the Hutchins place, as it did. But before I could get to the house, I was seen from one of the hill fields, someone hailed me, and I found myself confronting a barrel-chested man half a head taller than myself, who demanded truculently to know where I was going.

  “I’m on my way to Hutchins,” I said.

  “No need your goin’, then,” he said. “They ain’t to home. I w
ork for ’em. Name’s Amos Whateley.”

  But I had spoken to Amos Whateley before; I recognized his voice as that of the man who had early that morning told me to “git aout o’here as fast as ye c’n git!” I looked at him for a minute in silence.

  “I’m Dan Harrop,” I said finally. “I came up here to find out what happened to my cousin Abel, and I mean to find out.”

  I could see that he had known who I was. He stood considering me for a moment before he spoke. “An’ if ye find out, ye’ll go?”

  “I have no other reason for staying.”

  He seemed indecisive, still, as if he did not trust me. “Ye’ll sell the haouse?” he wanted to know.

  “I can’t use it.”

  “I’ll tell ye then,” he said with abrupt decision. “Yer cousin, him as was Abel Harrop, was took off by Them from Aoutside. He called ’em an’ They come.” He paused as suddenly as he had begun to speak, his dark eyes earching my face. “Ye dun’t believe,” he cried. “Ye dun’t know!”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “Abaout Them from Aoutside.” He looked distressed. “I hadn’t to a tol’ ye, then. Ye’ll pay no mind to me.”

  I tried to be patient, and explained once more that I wanted only to know what had happened to Abel.

  But he was no longer interested in my cousin’s fate. Still searching my face keenly, he demanded, “The books! Hev ye read the books?”

  I shook my head.

  “I tell ye to burn ’em—burn ’em all, afore it’s too late!” He spoke with almost frantic insistence. “I know whut’s in ’em, summat.”

  It was this strange adjuration which ultimately sent me to the books my cousin had left.

  That evening I sat down at the table where my cousin must so often have sat, by the light of the same lamp, with the chorus of whippoorwills already rising outside, to look with greater care at the book my cousin had been reading. I discovered almost at once, to my astonishment, that the print which I had mistaken for an old imitation of script was indeed script, and I had, further, the uncomfortable conviction that the manuscript, which had no title, was bound in human skin. Certainly it was very old, and it had the appearance of having been put together of scattered sheets of paper, on which its compiler had copied sentences and pages from books not his own. Some of it was in Latin, some in French, some in English; though the writer’s script was too execrable to permit any assurance in reading the Latin or French, I could make out the English after some study.

  Most of it was plainly gibberish, but there were two pages which my cousin—or some previous reader—had marked in red crayon, and these I deemed must have been of some signal importance to Abel. I set about to make some sort of clarity out of the crabbed script. The first of them was fortunately short.

  “To summon Yogge-Suthothe from the Outside, be wise to wait upon the Sun in the Fifth House, when Saturn is in trine; draw the pentagram of fire, and speak the Ninth Verse thrice, repeating which each Roodemas and Hallow’s Eve causeth the Thing to breed in the Outside Spaces beyond the gate, of which Yogge-Sothothe is the Guardian. The once will not bring Him, but may bring Another Who is likewise desirous of growth, and if He have not the blood of Another, He may seek thine own. Therefore be not unwise in these things.”

  To this my cousin had written a postscript: “Cf. page 77 in Text.”

  Putting aside this reference, I turned to the other marked page, but no matter how carefully I read it, I could not make out of it anything but a highly fanciful rigmarole evidently copied faithfully from a far older manuscript—

  “Concern’g ye Old Ones, ’tis writ, they wait ev’r at ye Gate, & ye Gate is all places at all times, for They know noth’g of time or place but are in all time & in all place together without appear’g to be, & there are those amongst Them which can assume divers Shapes & Featurs & any gi’n Shape & any giv’n Face & ye Gates are for Them ev’rywhere, but ye 1st. was that which I caus’d to be op’d, Namely, in Irem, ye City of Pillars, ye City under ye Desert, but wher’r men sayeth ye forbidd’n Words, they shall cause there a Gate to be establish’d & shall wait upon Them Who Come through ye Gate, ev’n as ye Dhols, & ye Abomin. Mi-Go, & ye Tcho-Tcho peop., & ye Deep Ones, & ye Gugs, & ye Gaunts of ye Night & ye Shoggoths & ye Voormis, & ye Shantaks which guard Kadath in ye Cold Waste & ye Plateau Leng. All are alike ye Children of ye Elder Gods, but ye Great Race of Yith & ye Gr. Old Ones fail’g to agree, one with another, & boath with ye Elder Gods, separat’d, leav’g ye Gr. Old Ones in possession of ye Earth, while ye Great Race, return’g from Yith took up Their Abode forward in Time in Earth-Land not yet known to those who walk ye Earth today, & there wait till there shall come again ye winds & ye Voices which drove Them forth before & That which Walketh on ye Winds over ye Earth & in ye spaces that are among ye Stars forev’r.

  I read this with amazement and wonder, but, since it meant nothing to me, I returned to the original marked page and attempted to puzzle meaning out of that. I could not, save that I had an uneasy memory of Amos Whateley’s reference to “Them Outside”. I guessed, finally, that my cousin’s appended note referred to the R’lyeh Text; so I took up this slender volume and looked to the indicated page.

  My language-study was unfortunately not thorough enough to read the page with any sure meaning, but it appeared to be a formula or chant summoning some ancient being in which some primitive peoples had evidently once believed. I went through it uncertainly in silence; then I read it slowly aloud, but it seemed to have no greater meaning audibly, except only as a curious aspect of ancient religious credos, for to such facets of existence I deemed it was related.

  By the time I rose wearily from the books, the whippoorwills had once again taken possession of the valley. I put out the light and looked into the moonlit darkness beyond the house. The birds were there, as before; they made dark shadows on the grass, on the roofs. In the moonlight they had a strange appearance of being uncannily distorted, and they were certainly abnormally large birds. I had thought of whippoorwills as not more than ten inches in length, but these birds were easily twelve to fourteen inches long, and of an equivalent thickness, so that they appeared singularly large. Doubtless, however, this was due to some trick of moonlight and shadow, acting upon a tired and already overburdened imagination. But there was no gainsaying the fact that the vehemence and loudness of their calls was in ratio to their apparently abnormal size. There was considerably less movement among them that night, however, and I had the uneasy conviction that they sat there calling as if calling to someone or something or as if waiting for something to happen, so that Hester Hutchins’ hushed urgent voice came back to mind with disturbing persistence, “They’re awaitin’ to ketch somebody’s soul…”

  II

  The strange events which subsequently took place at my cousin’s house date from that night. Whatever it was that set it in motion, some malign force seemed to possess the entire valley. Sometime during that night I woke, convinced that something more than the ceaseless storming of the whippoorwills gave voice in the moonlit dark. I lay listening, almost instantly wide awake, listening for whatever it was, listening until the endless whippoorwill screamed from a thousand throats seemed to mark the very pulsing of my blood, the throbbing of the spheres!

  Then I heard it—and listened—and doubted the evidence of my own ears.

  A kind of chanting, rising momentarily to ululation, but certainly in a tongue I did not know. Even now I cannot describe it with any adequacy. Perhaps, if one could imagine turning on several radio stations at once and listening to alien languages pouring forth from each one, hopelessly jumbled, it might establish a sort of parallel. Yet, there seemed to be a kind of pattern, and, try as I might, I could not disabuse myself of this notion. The gibberish I heard mingled uncannily with the crying of the whippoorwills. It reminded me of a litany, with the priest leading the recitative, and the audience murmuring in answer. The sound came intermittently, an odd predominance of consonants with but an occasio
nal vowel. The most intelligible sounds, which seemed to be repeated, were these:

  “Lllllll-nglui, nnnnn-lagl, fhtagn-ngah, ai Yog-Sothoth!”

  These were given voice in a crescendo of sound, bursting explosively at the last syllables, to which the whippoorwills responded in rhythmic song. It was not that they ceased crying, but only that when the other sounds came, the calling of the whippoorwills receded and faded as if into distance, then rushed forward and swelled out triumphantly in answer to the sounds in the night.

  Strange and terrible as these sounds were, however, their source was even more frightening, for they came from somewhere within the house—either from the rooms above or from those below; and, with each moment that I listened, I became more and more convinced that the hideous gibberish I heard arose from somewhere within the room where I lay. It was as if the very walls pulsed with the sound, as if the entire house throbbed with this incredible mouthing, as if, indeed, my very being took part in this horror-fraught litany—not passively, but actively, even joyously!

  How long I lay there virtually in a cataleptic state, I do not know. But eventually the invading sounds ceased; I was briefly aware of what seemed to be earth-shaking steps moving off into the heavens accompanied by a vast fluttering, as of whippoorwills rising from the roofs and surrounding earth; then I fell into a deep sleep from which I did not awaken until midday.

  I rose with alacrity then, for I meant to pursue my inquiry among my other neighbors with as much dispatch as possible. But I had intended, too, to look further into my cousin’s books; yet that noon, when I came into the study and approached the table, I closed the book he had been reading and threw it carelessly to one side. I did this in full awareness of what I was doing, and yet with the intention of reading in it as much as I could. But there was something else lurking on the edge of my consciousness, a stubborn, unreasonable assurance that I knew all that in this book, and all that was in the rest of them piled here and there, and more than that, much more. And even as I took in this conviction, there seemed to rise up from deep inside me, as if it were from an ancestral memory to which I knew no bridge, a towering of awareness, and there crossed before my mind’s eye vast and titanic heights and illimitable depths, and I saw great, amorphous beings like masses of protoplasmic jelly, thrusting forth tentacle-like appendages, standing on no known earth but on a dark, forbidding ground, devoid of vegetation, struck out gigantically against no known stars. And in the inner ear I heard names chanted and sung—Cthulhu, Yog-Suthoth, Hastur, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and many more—and I knew these for the Ancient Ones thrust forth by the Elder Gods and waiting now at the Gate to be summoned to their abode on earth as once in aeons past, and all the pomp and glory of serving them was clear to me, and I knew they would come again to wage their battle for the earth and all the peoples of the earth and once more tempt the wrath of the Elder Gods, even as the poor, pitiable wretches of human kind tempted the wrath of their own fates! And I knew, as Abel knew, that their servants are the chosen ones who shall worship them and give them shelter, who shall house them and feed them until the time of their coming again, when the Gate is opened wide, and a thousand lesser Gates are opened to them in all the places of earth!