The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

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

  And I, too, raised my voice in praise of Him, the Lurker at the Threshold …

  “Lllllll-nglui, nnnn-lagl, fhtagn-nghah, ai Yog-Sothoth!”

  That is what they say I was screaming when they found me crouching beside the body of poor Amelia Hutchins, tearing at her throat—the helpless woman struck down on her way back along the ridge path from a visit to Abbey Giles. That is what they say I mouthed in my bestial rage, with the whippoorwills all around, crying and screaming in their maddening voices. And that is why they have locked me into this room with the bars at the window. Oh, the fools! The fools! Having failed once with Abel, they grasp at straws. How can they think to keep one of the Chosen Ones from Them? What are bars to Them?

  But they are trying to frighten me when they say I have done these things. I never raised my hand against any human being. I have told them how it was, if only they would see. I told them. It was not I, never! No, I know who it was. I think I have always known, and if they look, they will find proof.

  It was the whippoorwills, the incessantly calling whippoorwills, the damnable, lurking whippoorwills waiting out there, the whippoorwills, the whippoorwills in the hills …

  Something in Wood

  IT IS FORTUNATE that the limitations of the human mind do not often permit viewing in proper perspective all the facts and events upon which it touches. I have thought this many times particularly in regard to the curious circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Jason Wecter, music and art critic of the Boston Dial, which took place a year ago and about which many theories were advanced, ranging from a suspicion of murder by some disappointed artist, smarting under Wecter’s biting invective, to the belief that Wecter simply took off for parts unknown, without word to anyone, and for a reason known only to himself.

  This latter belief comes closer to actuality, perhaps, than is commonly supposed, though its acceptance is a matter of terminology, and involves the question of whether or not Wecter’s absence was voluntary of involuntary. There is, however, one explanation which offers itself to those who are imaginative enough to grasp it, and the certain circumstances surrounding the event lead, indeed, to no other conclusion. In these circumstances I had a part, not a small one, by any means, though it was not recognized as such even by me until after the fact of Jason Wecter’s vanishing.

  These events began with the expression of a wish, than which nothing could be more prosaic. Wecter, who lived alone in an old house in King’s Lane, Cambridge, well away from the beaten thoroughfare, was a collector of primitive art work, preferably in wood or stone; he had such things as the strange religious carvings of the Penitentes, the bas-reliefs of the Mayas, the outré sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith, the wooden fetish figures and the carvings of gods and goddesses out of the South Sea islands, and many others; and he had wished for something in wood that might be “different”, though the pieces by Smith seemed to me to offer as much variety as anyone could wish. But Smith’s were not in wood; Wecter wanted something in wood to balance his collection, and, admittedly, he had nothing in wood save some few masks from Ponape which came close to the strange and wonderful imagery of the Smith sculptures.

  I suppose that more than one of his friends was looking for something in wood for Jason Wecter, but it fell to my lot to find it one day in an out-of-the-way second-hand shop in Portland, where I had gone for a holiday—a strange piece indeed, but exquisitely done, a kind of bas-relief of an octopoid creature rising out of a broken, monolithic structure in a subaqueous setting. The price of four dollars was extremely reasonable, and the fact that I could not interpret the carving was, if anything, all the more likely to add to its value in Wecter’s eyes.

  I have described the “creature” as “octopoid”, but it was not an octopus. What it was I did not know; its appearance suggested a body much longer than and different from that of an octopus, and its tentacular appendages issued not only from its face, as if from the place where a nose ought to be—much as in the Smith sculpture, Elder God— but also from its sides and from the central part of its body. The two appendages issuing from its face were clearly prehensile and were carved in the attitude of flaring outward, as if about to grasp, or grasping, something. Immediately above these two tentacles were deep-set eyes, carved with uncanny skill, so that the impression was one of vast and disturbing evil. At its base there was carved a line in no known language:

  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Of the nature of the wood in which it was carved—a dark brown, almost black wood with a hitherto unfamiliar grain of many whorls—I knew nothing, save that it was unusually heavy for wood. Though it was larger than I had in mind to get for Jason Wecter, I knew that he would like it.

  Where had it come from? I asked the phlegmatic little man behind the cluttered desk. He raised his spectacles to his forehead and said the he could tell me no more than that it had come out of the Atlantic. “Maybe washed off some vessel,” he hazarded. It had been brought in with other things but a week or two ago by an old fellow who habitually scavenged along the coast for such pieces among the debris washed up by the sea. I asked what it might represent, but of this the proprietor knew even less than of its source. Jason was therefore free to invent any legend he chose to account for it.

  He was delighted with the piece, and especially because he discovered immediately certain startling similarities between it and the stone sculptures by Smith. As an authority on primitive art, he pointed out another factor which made it clear that the proprietor of the shop from which I had obtained it had practically given it to me at four dollars—certain marks which indicated that the piece had been made by tools far older than those of our own time, or indeed, of the civilized world as we know it. These details were but of passing interest to me, of course, since I did not share Wecter’s liking for primitives, but I confess to feeling an unaccountable revulsion at Wecter’s juxtaposition of this octopoid carving with Smith’s work, arising out of unvoiced questions which troubled me—if indeed this thing were centuries old, as Wecter inferred, and represented no known kind of carving previously recognized, how came it that the modern sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith bore such resemblance to it?— and was it not more than a coincidence that Smith’s figures created out of the stuff of his weird fiction and poetry, should parallel the art of someone removed many hundreds of years in time and leagues in space from him?

  But these questions were not asked. Perhaps if they had been, subsequent events might have been altered. Wecter’s enthusiasm and delight were accepted as tributes to my judgment and the carving placed on his wide mantel with the best of his wooden pieces; there I was content to leave it, and to forget it.

  It was a fortnight before I saw Jason Wecter again, and I would perhaps not have seen him immediately on my return to Boston if it had not been for my attention being called to a particularly savage criticism of a public showing of the sculptures of Oscar Bogdoga, whose work Wecter had given high praise only two months before. Indeed, Wecter’s review of his show was of such a nature as to excite the disturbed interest of many mutual friends; it indicated a new approach to sculpture on Wecter’s part, and promised many surprises to those who regularly followed his criticisms. However, one of our mutual acquaintances who was a psychiatrist, confessed to some alarm over the curious allusions manifest in Wecter’s short but remarkable article.

  I read it with mounting surprise, and immediately observed certain distinct departures from Wecter’s customary manner. His charge that Bogdoga’s work lacked “fire … the element of suspense … any pretense of spirituality” was usual enough; but the assertions that the artist “evidently had no familiarity with the cult-art of Ahapi or Ahmnoida” and that Bogdoga might have done better than a hybrid imitation of “the Ponape school” were not only inapropos but completely out of character, for Bogdoga was a mid-European whose heavy masses bore far more similarity to those of Epstein than
to the work of, for instance, Mestrovic, and certainly none at all to the primitives which were such a delight to Wecter, and which had manifestly now begun to affect his judgment. For Wecter’s entire article was studded with strange references to artists no one had even heard of, to places far in space and time, if indeed they were of this earth, and to culture patterns which bore no relation whatever to any at all familiar even to informed readers.

  Yet his approach to Bogdoga’s art had not been entirely unanticipated, for he had only two days before written a critique of a new symphony by Franz Hoebel given its initial performance by the flamboyant and ego-centric Fradelitski, filled with references to “the fluted music of the spheres,” and “those piped notes, pre-Druidic in origin, which haunted the aether long before mankind raised an instrument of any kind to hands or lips.” At the same time he had hailed a playing, on the same program, of Harris’s Symphony Number 3, which he had publicly detested previously, as “a brilliant example of a return to that preprimitive music which haunts the ancestral consciousness of mankind, the music of the Great Old Ones, emerging despite the over-layer of Fradelitski—but then, Fradelitski, having no creative music in him, must of necessity impose upon every work under his baton enough Fradelitski to gratify his ego, no matter how much it may slander the composer.”

  These two utterly mystifying reviews sent me in haste to Wecter’s home, where I found him brooding at his desk with the offending reviews and a sizable stack of letters—doubtless in protest—before him.

  “Ah, Pinckney,” he greeted me, “no doubt you too are brought here by these curious reviews of mine.”

  “Not exactly,” I hedged. “Recognizing that any criticism stems from personal opinions, you’re at liberty to write what you like, as long as you’re sincere. But who the devil are Ahapi and Ahmnoida?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  He spoke so earnestly that I could not doubt his sincerity.

  “But I haven’t a doubt that they existed,” he went on. “Just as the Great Old Ones appear to have some status in ancient lore.”

  “How did you come to refer to them if you don’t know who they are?” I asked.

  “I can’t entirely explain that, either, Pinckney,” he answered, a troubled frown on his face. “But I can try.”

  Thereupon he launched into a not entirely coherent account of certain things which had happened to him ever since his acquisition of the octopoidal carving I had found in Portland. He had not spent a night free of dreams in which the strange creature of the carving existed, either in the foreground or ever aware on the rim of his dream. He had dreamed of subterrene places and of cities beneath the sea; he had seen himself in the Carolines and in Peru; he had walked by dream under leering gambrel-roofed houses, in legend-haunted Arkham; he had ridden in strange sea-going craft to places beyond the reaches of the known oceans. The carving, he knew, was a miniature, for the creature was a great, protoplasmic being, capable of changing shape in myriad ways. Its name, said Pinckney, was Cthulhu; its domain was R’lyeh, an awesome city far under the Atlantic. It was one of the Great Old Ones, who were believed to be reaching from other dimensions and far stars, as well as from the sea’s depths and pockets in space for re-establishment of their ancient dominion over earth. It appeared accompanied by amorphous dwarfs, clearly sub-human, which went before it playing strange pipes making music of no known parallel. Apparently the carving, which had been made in very ancient times, very probably before any kind of human record was kept, but after the dawn of mankind, by artisans in the Carolines, was a “point of contact” from the alien dimension inhabited by the beings which sought return.

  I confess that I listened with some misgivings, noticing which, Wecter stopped talking abruptly, rose, and brought the octopoidal carving from the mantel to his desk. He put it down before me.

  “Look at that carefully, now, Pinckney. Do you see anything different about it?”

  I examined it with care, and announced finally that I could see no alteration.

  “It doesn’t seem to you that the extended tentacles from the face are—let us put it ‘more extended’?”

  I said it did not. But even as I spoke I could not be certain. The suggestion is all too often father of the fact. Was there an extension or not? I could not say then; I cannot say now. But plainly Wecter believed that some extension had taken place. I examined the carving anew, and felt again that curious revulsion I had first experienced at noticing the similarity between the sculptures of Smith and this curious piece.

  “It doesn’t strike you, then, that the ends of the tentacles have lifted and pushed out further?” he pressed.

  “I can’t say it does.”

  “Very well.” He took the carving and restored it to its place on the mantel.

  Coming back to his desk, he said, “I’m afraid you’ll think me deranged, Pinckney, but the fact is that ever since I’ve had this in my study, I’ve been aware of existing in what I can only describe as dimensions different from those we commonly know, dimensions, in short, such as those I’ve dreamed about. For instance, I have no memory of having written these reviews; yet they are mine. I find them in my script, in my proofs, in my column. I know, in short, that I and no one else wrote these reviews. I cannot publicly disown them, though I realize very well that they contradict opinions set down over my signature many times before this. Yet it cannot be denied that there is a curiously impressive logic running through them; since reading them—and, incidentally, the indignant letters I have received about them—I have given the matter some study. Contrary to the opinions you may have heard me express previously, the work of Bogdoga does have a relationship to a hybrid form of early Carolinian cult-art, and the third Symphony of Harris does have a marked and disturbing appeal to the primitive, so that one must ask whether their initial offensiveness to traditionally sensitive or cultured people is not an instinctive reaction against the primitive which the inner self instantly acknowledges.”

  He shrugged. “But that’s neither here nor there, is it, Pinckney? The fact is that the carving you found in Portland has exercised an irrationally disturbing influence on me to such an extent that I am sometimes not sure whether it has been for the best or not.”

  “What kind of influence, Jason?”

  He smiled strangely. “Let me tell you how I feel it. The first night I was aware of it was that immediately after you left it here. There was a party here that evening, but by midnight the guests were gone, and I was at my typewriter. Now then, I had a prosaic piece to do—something about a little piano recital by one of Fradelitski’s pupils, and I got it off in no time at all. But all the time I was aware of that carving. Now, I was aware of it on two planes; the one was that on which it came into my possession, as a gift from you, an object of no great size, and clearly three-dimensional; the other was an extension—or invasion, if you like—into a different dimension, in relation to which I existed in this room against the carving as a seed to a pumpkin. In short, when I had finished the brief notice I wrote I had only the odd illusion that the carving had grown to unimaginable proportions; for a cataclysmic instant I felt that it had added concrete being, that it was reared up before me as a colossus against which I stood as a pathetic miniature. This lasted but a moment; then it withdrew. Note that I say it withdrew; it did not just cease to exist; no, it seemed to compress, to draw back; precisely as if it were drawing out of this new dimensions to return to its actual state as it must exist before my eyes—but as it need not exist before my psychic perception. This has continued; I assure you, it is not an hallucination, though I see by your expression that you are thinking I’ve taken leave of my senses.”

  It was not as bad as that, I hastened to assure him. What he said was either true or it was not; the presumptive evidence, based on the concrete facts of his strange reviews, indicated that he was sincere; therefore, for Jason Wecter, what he said was true. It must therefore have meaning and motivation.

  “Postulating that ever
ything you say is true,” I said at last, cautiously, “there must be some reason for it. Perhaps you’re working too hard, and this is an extension of your own subconscious.”

  “Good old Pinckney!” he exclaimed, laughing.

  “Or, if it is not, it must then have some motivation from outside.”

  His smile vanished; his eyes narrowed. “You concede that, do you, Pinckney?”

  “Presumptively, yes.”

  “Good. So I thought after my third experience. Twice I was perfectly willing to lay to sensory illusion; three times, no. The hallucinations experienced as a result of eye-strain are seldom as elaborate as that, tend to be limited to imaginary rats, dots, and the like. So then, if this creature belongs to a cult in that it is the object of worship—and I understand that its worship extends into our own day, though secretly—there seems to be but one explanation. I return to what I said before—that carving is a focal point of contact from another dimension in time or space; granting that, then plainly the creature is attempting to reach through to me.”

  “How?” I asked bluntly.

  “Ah, I am not a mathematician, not a scientist. I am only a music and art critic. That conclusion represents the outside limits of my extra-cultural knowledge.”