The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

  My uncle’s visitor spat a single word: “Lloigor!” and there was no reply from my uncle.

  I was conscious of a subtle undercurrent of terror, quite apart from the atmosphere of menace that pervaded the old house; this was because I had recognized in my uncle’s speech the same words spoken but a few moments ago by Eldon in his sleep, and understood that some malign influence was at work in the house. Moreover, there began to drift back into my mind certain memories of strange narratives brought back across the years from a time when I had delved into the forbidden texts at Miskatonic University: weird, incredible tales of Ancient Gods, of evil beings older than man; I began to dwell upon the terrible secrets concealed in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, in the R’lyeh Text, those vague, suggestive stories of creatures too horrible to contemplate in the prosaic existence of today. I attempted to shake myself free of the cloud of fear that insidiously overcame me, but there was that in the atmosphere of the house to make this impossible. Fortunately, the arrival of my cousin Eldon did what I myself could not do.

  He had crept up the stairs behind me and now stood waiting for some move on my part. I motioned him forward and told him what I had heard. Then we bent to listen together. There was no longer the sound of conversation, but only a sullen, unintelligible muttering accompanied by the growing sound of footsteps, or rather, of sounds which, by their spacing, might have been footsteps, but were made not by any creature familiar to my ears by its sound, but something which seemed at every step to be walking into a bog; now there was, too, a faint inner trembling in the old house, a strange, unnatural shuddering, which neither decreased nor increased, but continued until the sound of footsteps ceased, fading into the distance.

  During all this time no sound had escaped us, but when the footsteps crossed the room behind the door and went on into space beyond the house, Eldon caught his breath and held it until I could hear the blood pounding in his temples bent close to mine.

  “Good God!” he burst out at last. “What is it?”

  I did not trust myself to answer, but had begun to turn slightly to make some kind of reply, when the door opened with a suddenness that left us both speechless.

  My uncle Asa stood there; from behind him on all sides came an overpowering smell, as of fish or frogs, a thick miasmic odor of stagnant water so powerful that it brought me close to nausea.

  “I heard you,” my uncle said slowly. “Come in.”

  He stepped aside, and we entered his room, Eldon still somewhat reluctant. The windows in the opposite wall were wide open. At first the dim light disclosed nothing, for it was itself as if shrouded in fog, but presently it was evident that something wet had been in the room, something that gave off a heavy vapor, for walls, floors, furniture—all were covered with a heavy dew, and here and there on the floor stood pools of water. My uncle did not appear to notice, or, accustomed to it, had forgotten about it; he sat down in his arm-chair and looked at us, motioning us to seats before him. The vapor had begun almost imperceptibly to lift and Uncle Asa’s face grew clearer to my eyes—his squat head even deeper in his body now, his forehead gone entirely, his eyes half closed, so that his resemblance to the frogs of our childhood days was marked: a grotesque caricature, horrible in its implications. With only the slightest hesitation, we sat down.

  “Did you hear anything?” he asked. But without waiting for an answer, he went on. “I suppose you did. I have thought for some time I must tell you, and now—there may be little enough time left.

  “But I may deceive them yet, I may escape them….”

  He opened his eyes and looked at Eldon; he did not seem to see me at all. Eldon leaned forward a little anxiously, for it was evident that something troubled the old man; he was not himself, he seemed only half present, with his mind still wandering in some far place.

  “The Sandwin compact must end,” he said in a guttural voice not unlike that I had heard in the room. “You will remember that. Let no other Sandwin be in bondage to those creatures. Did you ever wonder where our income came from, Eldon?” he asked suddenly.

  “Why, yes—often,” Eldon managed to reply.

  “It’s been that way for three generations; my grandfather and my father before me. My grandfather signed my father away, and my father signed me away—but I shall not sign you away, never fear. This must be its end. So they will not allow me to go naturally as they did grandfather and father, they will take me before instead of waiting. But you will be free of them, Eldon, you will be free.”

  “Father, what is it? What’s the matter?”

  He did not appear to hear. “Make no compact with them, Eldon; shun them, avoid them. Evil is their heritage, such evil as you cannot know. These are things you are better without knowing.”

  “Who was here, Father?”

  “Their servant; he did not frighten me. Nor of Cthulhu am I afraid, nor Ithaqua, with whom I have ridden high over the face of the earth, over Egypt and Samarkand, over the great white silences, over Hawaii and the Pacific—but Lloigor, who can draw the body from the earth piecemeal, Lloigor with his twin brother, Zhar, and the horrible Tcho-Tcho people who tend them in the high plateaus of Tibet—of him… .” He paused abruptly and shuddered. “They have threatened me with his coming.” He took a deep breath. “Let him come, then.”

  My cousin said nothing, but looked his distress.

  “What is this compact, Uncle Asa?” I asked.

  “And you will remember,” he went on, oblivious to my question, “how your grandfather’s coffin was kept shut, and how light it was. There’s nothing in his grave, only the coffin; and in your great-grandfather’s, too. They took them, they have them, somewhere they have given them unnatural life, a soulless life—for nothing more than our sustenance, the small income we have had and the knowledge they gave us of their hideous secrets. It began, I think, in Innsmouth—my grandfather met someone there, someone who like him belonged to those creatures who came up, frog-like, out of the sea.” He shrugged and glanced once briefly toward the windows on the east, where now fog glowed whitely and the sound of the sea rose distantly, the long roll and murmur of water.

  My cousin was about to break the silence that had fallen with another question, when Uncle Asa turned once more to us and said briefly, curtly, “Enough now. Leave me.”

  Eldon protested, but my uncle was adamant. By this time I needed little further enlightenment; the stories I had heard about Innsmouth, the Tuttle affair on the Aylesbury road, the strange knowledge concealed in those shunned texts at Miskatonic University—the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Eibon, the R’lyeh Text—and, darkest of all, the dread Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred: all these things revived long-forgotten memories of potent evil Ancient Ones, elder beings of incredible age, old gods who once inhabited not only earth but the entire universe, who were divided between forces of ancient good and forces of ancient evil, of which the latter, now in leash, were yet greater in number if not in power. Most ancient of all, the Elder Gods, the forces of good were nameless; but weird and terrible names identified the others—Cthulhu, leader of the elemental water powers; Hastur, Ithaqua, Lloigor, who led the forces of air; Yog-Sothoth and Tsathoggua of earth. It was now apparent to me that three generations of Sandwins had made a hideous compact with these beings, a compact that promised surrender of soul and body in return for their great knowledge and security in the natural life of the Sandwins: but the most ghastly aspect of this compact was the obvious indication that each generation swore away the succeeding generation. My Uncle Asa had at last rebelled, and he now awaited the consequences.

  Once more in the hall, Eldon put a hand on my arm and said, “I don’t understand.”

  I shook his arm off almost roughly. “Nor I, Eldon; but I’ve some idea, and I want to get back to the library and verify it.”

  “You can’t go now.”

  “No, but f nothing happens for a day or so, I’ll go. I’ll come back later.”

  We spent an hour or so in Eldon
’s room, talking all around the trouble, and listening almost morbidly for evidence of further activity above; but there was nothing, and presently I returned to bed, almost as ill at ease for the lack of strange sounds and odors, as I had previously been at their happening.

  The remainder of the night passed uneventfully, and so did the next day, during all of which my Uncle Asa did not come from his room. The second night passed quietly, also; so that on the following day I returned to Arkham, welcoming the sight of the ancient gambrel roofs and Georgian balustrades as the face of home.

  In a fortnight I returned to Sandwin House, but nothing more had happened. I saw my uncle briefly and was astonished at the change in his aspect: he had grown to look more and more batrachian, and his body seemed to have shrunk a little. He made some effort to conceal his hands, but not before I had seen a peculiar transformation there: a curious growth of skin from finger to finger, the significance of which did not at first dawn on me. I asked him once what more he had heard from the visitors of that night two weeks ago.

  “I’m waiting for Lloigor,” he said cryptically, his eyes fixed beadily on the east windows, and a grimness about his mouth.

  In this hiatus, I had learned more about the dread secrets of the Elder Gods and the beings of evil they had long ago banished to the hidden places of the earth—the Arctic wastes, the desert land, the shunned Plateau of Leng in the heart of Asia, the Lake of Hali, the vast and remote caverns under the seas. I had learned enough to be convinced of my uncle’s hideous compact: the pledge of body and soul to serve the spawn of Cthulhu and Lloigor among the Tcho-Tcho people in remote Tibet, to serve them in after-life in their constant struggle against the domination of the Elder Gods, the seals put upon them by the retreating Ancient Ones, the struggle to rise again and spread horror throughout the earth.

  That my uncle’s father and grandfather were even now so serving in some distant fastness, I could not reasonably doubt, for evidence of evil activity was all about me, not alone in tangible things, but in the incredibly strong aura of intangible terror that held the house in siege. On that second visit I found my cousin somewhat reassured, but still waiting half fearfully for something to happen. I could not stir him to any hope, but must perforce reveal to him some of the things I had verified in the ancient and forbidden books reposing in the vaults of Miskatonic.

  On the night preceding my departure, while we sat a little uneasily in Eldon’s room waiting for something to happen, the door was suddenly opened and my uncle came in, walking with a strange, halting gait unnatural to him. He seemed somehow to have grown smaller, too, now that I saw him on his feet, and his clothes bagged on him.

  “Eldon, why don’t you go into Arkham with David tomorrow,” he said without preamble. “A little change will do you good.”

  “Yes, I’d like to have him,” I said.

  Eldon shook his head. “No, I’ll stay to see that nothing happens to you, Father.”

  Uncle Asa laughed bitterly and, I thought, with a faint sneer, as if to deprecate anything Eldon might attempt to do. If Eldon did not understand his father’s attitude, it was clear enough to me, since I knew more than Eldon something of the power of the primeval evil to which my uncle had become allied.

  My uncle shrugged then. “Well, you’re safe enough; unless you’re frightened to death. I don’t know.”

  “You expect something to happen soon, then?” I asked.

  The old man gave me a searching glance. “It is clear that you do, David,” he said thoughtfully. “I expect Lloigor, yes. If I am able to fight him, I shall be free of him. If I am not—“ He shrugged and added, “Then, I think, Sandwin House will be free of this accursed cloud of evil that has shrouded it for so long.”

  “There is a time?” I asked.

  His glance did not waiver, but his eyes narrowed a little. “When the full moon rises, I think. If my computations are correct, Arcturus must also be above the horizon before Lloigor can come on his cosmic wind—for, being a wind elemental, he will travel as wind. But I will be waiting for him.” He shrugged once more, as if he were dismissing some trivial event instead of the grave threat to his life that was inherent in his words. “Very well, then, Eldon; do as you wish.”

  He left the room and Eldon turned to me.

  “Can’t we help him fight this thing, Dave? There must be some way.”

  “If there is a way, your father knows it.”

  He hesitated for a long minute before he spoke of something evidently on his mind for some time. “Did you notice father’s appearance? How he seems to have changed?” He shuddered. “Like a frog, Dave.”

  I nodded. “There is some relation between his aspect and that of the creatures with whom he has become aligned. There was something of this in Innsmouth, too—people who bore a strange resemblance to the inhabitants of Devil Reef before the reef was bombed; you must remember it, Eldon.”

  He said no more until I spurred him on by telling him that he must keep in touch with me by telephone.

  “That may be too late, Dave.”

  “No, I’ll come at once. At the first sign of anything amiss, call me.”

  He agreed, and he went to bed for a restless but quiet night.

  The April moon reached its greatest fullness at approximately midnight on the night of April twenty-seventh. Long before that time, I was ready for Eldon’s telephone call; indeed, more than once in the late afternoon and early evening hours, I had the impulse to go to Sandwin House without waiting for Eldon to call, but I resisted. At nine o’clock that night, Eldon called; oddly enough, I had just become cognizant of Arcturus standing over the roofs of Arkham in the east, its amber light glowing brightly despite the brilliance of the moon. That something had happened, I knew, for Eldon’s voice shook, his words were clipped, he was eager to say what he must so that I could come without delay.

  “For God’s sake, Dave—come.”

  He said no more; he needed to say no more. Within a few minutes I was in my car speeding up the coast toward Sandwin House. The night was quiet, windless; killdeers and whippoorwills were calling, and an occasional nighthawk swooped and skycoasted within the glow of my car’s lights. The air was fragrant with the smell of growing things, the rich aroma of turned earth and early foliage, of swampland and open water, all in direct contrast to the horror that clung tenaciously to mind.

  As before, Eldon met me in the yard at Sandwin House. I had no sooner got out of my car than he was there beside me, greatly distraught, his hands trembling.

  “Ambrose has just gone,” he said. “He went before the wind started—because of the whippoorwills.”

  As he spoke, I was conscious of the whippoorwills: scores of them calling from all around, and I remembered the superstition believed by so many of the natives—that at the approach of death, the whippoorwills, in the service of evil, called for the soul of the dying. Their crying was constant, unceasing, rising most steadily and loudly from the meadows west of the Sandwin House, but sounding to some degree all around: a kind of maddening outcry for the birds seemed close, and the cry of a whippoorwill, nostalgic and lonely at a distance, multiplied many times and placed near by, becomes a harsh, shrill call, difficult to tolerate for long: I smiled grimly at Ambrose’s flight, and remembered Eldon’s saying he had gone before the wind began. The night was windless till.

  “What wind?” I asked abruptly.

  “Come in.”

  He turned and led the way swiftly into the house.

  From the moment that I stepped across the threshold of Sandwin House that night, I entered another world, remote from that I had just left. For the first thing of which I was cognizant was the high rushing sound of great winds; the house itself seemed to tremble under the impact of tremendous forces from without, and yet I knew, having just come in from outside, that the air was quiet, that no wind blew. The winds, then, sounded within the house, from the upper stories, those quarters occupied by my Uncle Asa, those quarters linked psychically to the incr
edible evil with which he had become allied. In addition to this incessant rushing of wind, there came as from a great distance that shuddering familiar ululation, striking in from the east, and at the same time the sound of gigantic footsteps, the soggy, wet footsteps, accompanied by an undeniable sucking noise that seemed to emanate from somewhere beneath us and yet beyond the house itself, beyond even terrestrial earth as we knew it: this, too, was a manifestation

  of those evil beings with whom the Sandwins had made the ghastly compact.

  “Where’s your father?” I asked.

  “In his rooms; he won’t come out. The door’s shut, and I can’t go in.”

  I went up the stairs toward the door to my uncle’s quarters with the intention of opening that door by force. Eldon came protestingly behind; it was no use, he assured me; he had tried it and failed. I was almost upon the door when I was stopped in mid-stride by an impassible border—no thing of substance, but a a wall of cold, chilling air beyond which I could not go, no matter how much tried.

  “You see!” cried Eldon.

  I tried and tried again to reach through that impassive wall of air toward the door, but I could not. Finally, in desperation, I called out to Uncle Asa. But no human voice answered me; I was not answered at all save by the roaring of great winds somewhere beyond that door, for, strong as the winds had sounded in the lower hall, in the quarters occupied by my uncle the sound of them was incredibly powerful, and it seemed as if at any moment the walls must fly asunder by the terrific forces that were unleashed there. Throughout all this time, the sound of footsteps and the ululation too were growing in magnitude; they were approaching the house from the direction of the sea, if such an occurrence were possible in the light of their seeming already there, a part of the unholy aura of evil in which Sandwin House was cloaked. Simultaneously with the approach of these sounds from the water, there struck into our consciousness another sound from high above us, a sound so incredible, that Eldon looked at me and I at him as if we had not heard aright: it was the sound of music and of voices singing, rising and falling, alternately clear and vague. But in a moment we understood the source of that music as the same from which had come that weirdly beautiful music we had heard in our dreams in Sandwin House; for the music, on the surface of it so beautiful and ethereal, abounded with hellish undertones. It was such music as the sirens might have sung to Ulysses, it was beautiful as the Venusberg music, but perverted by evil that was horribly manifest.