The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

  I turned to Eldon, who stood wide-eyed and trembling behind me. “Are there any windows open?”

  “Not in father’s rooms. He worked at that the past few days.” He held his head cocked to one side and suddenly gripped my arm. “Listen!”

  There arose now from behind the door a growing ululation accompanied by a ghastly gibbering from among which certain words were audible, certain horrible words only too familiar to me from sight of them in those forbidden books at Miskatonic University, the sounds of those creatures bound in unholy alliance to the Sandwins, the evil mouthings of those hellish beings long ago banished to outer spaces, to remote places of earth and universe by the Elder Gods on distant Betelgeuse.

  I listened with mounting horror, made all the greater by knowledge of my impotence, and tinged now with a certain nameless fear for my own existence. The mouthings beyond the door mounted in intensity, with occasionally a sharp sound that must have been made by someone different from them. Their own voices were clear, however, rising and falling even as music still sounded distantly, as if a group of servants were singing their adoration for their master, a hellish chant, a triumphant ululation:

  “Iä! Iä! Lloigor! Ugh! Shub-Niggurath! … Lloigor fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ithaqua! Ithaqua! … Iä! Iä! Lloigor cf’ayak vulgtmm, vugtlagln vulgtmm. Ai! Ai! Ai!”

  There was a brief lull, during which some voice came as if in answer: a harsh, frog-like croaking of words unintelligible to me: in a voice whose harsh sound still bore some overtones vaguely, arrestingly familiar to me, as if somewhere before I had heard certain of these inflections. This harsh croaking came more and more hesitantly, the gutturals apparently failing the speaker, and then once again rose that triumphant ululation, that maddening chorus of voices from beyond the door, accompanied by such a feeling of dread horror that no words can describe it.

  Trembling violently, my cousin held out his arm to show me that his wristwatch indicated but a few minutes before midnight, the hour of the full moon. The voices in the rooms before us continued to rise in intensity, and the wind rose, so that it was as if we stood in a raging cyclone; at the same time the harsh croaking voice resumed again, mounting in intensity until abruptly it changed into the most awful wailing man ever heard, the crying of a lost soul, the demon-ridden scream of a soul lost for all time.

  It was then, I think, that realization came to me, that I knew and recognized the harsh croaking voice as not one of my uncle’s hellish visitor’s at all, but the voice of Uncle Asa!

  At the moment of this ghastly recognition, which must have come to Eldon at the same time, the sounds beyond the door rose to unbearable shrillness, the demoniac winds thundered and roared; my head whirled; I clapped my hands to my ears—so much I remember, and then nothing more.

  I awoke to find Eldon bending over me; I was still in the upper hall, lying on the floor before the entrance to my uncle’s quarters, and Eldon’s pale, luminous eyes were peering anxiously into mine.

  “You fainted,” he whispered. “So did I.”

  I started up, startled by the sound of his voice that seemed so loud, though it had been but a whisper.

  All was still. No sound disturbed the quiet of Sandwin House. At the far end of the hall the moonlight lay in a parallelogram of white light, lending a mystic illumination to the darkness all around. My cousin looked toward the door to my uncle’s quarters, and I went forward unhesitatingly, and yet afraid of what we might find behind it.

  The door was still locked; we had finally to break it down. Eldon struck a match to relieve the deep darkness of the rooms.

  I don’t know what Eldon expected to find, but what we found was far beyond even my most fearful expectations. Even as Eldon had said, the windows had been boarded up so securely that not a single ray of moonlight penetrated the rooms, and on the sills had been laid a strange collection of five-pointed stones. But there had been one point of entrance my uncle had evidently forgotten: the attic window, though this was closed and locked save for a tiny break in one pane. The course of my uncle’s visitors had been unmistakable—a wet trail leading into the quarters from the trap-door near the attic window. The rooms were in frightful condition: no single thing remained intact save the chair in which my uncle habitually sat; it was indeed as if a powerful gale had torn asunder papers, furniture, hangings with equal malevolence.

  But it was my uncle’s chair to which our attention was directed, and what we saw there was all the more frightful in its significance now that the tangible aura of horror had been removed from Sandwin House. The trail leading from the trap-door and attic window went directly to my uncle’s chair and back again: a strange shapeless procession of marks—snake-like, some of them, the prints of webbed feet, which, most curiously, seemed to emanate from the chair in which my uncle had been wont to sit and pass outward: all led back to that tiny break in the pane of the attic window; something had come in and something more had gone out. Incredible, terrible, awful to contemplate—what must have taken place while we lay beyond the door, what must have wrung from my uncle that terrible wailing we had heard before we lapsed into unconsciousness.

  For of my uncle there was no trace save on—the ghastly remnants of what stood for him, rather than of him. In the chair, his favorite chair, lay his clothes: not taken off and flung carelessly down, not that—but in the horrible, life-like position of a man sitting there, fallen a little together: from cravat to shoes, the terrible shell about which clung an abysmal clothing shaped by some ghastly power beyond our comprehension into the effigy of the man who had worn them, the man who, by all the evidence, was drawn or sucked out of them as by some frightful, malign being who employed in his aid the terrible wind heard within the rooms: the mark of Lloigor, who walks the winds among the star-spaces, the terrible Lloigor against whom my uncle had had no weapon!

  The House in the Valley

  I, JEFFERSON BATES, make this deposition now, in full knowledge that, whatever the circumstances, I have not long to live. I do so in justice to those who survive me, as well as in an attempt to clear myself of the charge of which I have been so unjustly convicted. A great, if little-known American writer in the tradition of the Gothic once wrote that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” yet I have had ample time for intense thought and reflection, and I have achieved an order in my thoughts I would never have thought possible only so little as a year ago.

  For, of course, it was within the year that my “trouble” began. I put it so because I am not yet certain what other name to give it. If I had to set a precise day, I suppose in all fairness, it must be the day on which Brent Nicholson telephoned me in Boston to say he had discovered and rented for me the very place of isolation and natural beauty I had been seeking for the purpose of working at some paintings I had long had in mind. It lay in an almost hidden valley beside a broad stream, not far from, yet well in from the Massachusetts coast, in the vicinity of the ancient settlements of Arkham and Dunwich, which every artist of the region knows for their curious gambrel structure, so pleasing to the eye, however forbidding to the spirit.

  True, I hesitated. There were always fellow artists pausing for a day in Arkham or Dunwich or Kingston, and it was precisely fellow-artists I sought to escape. But in the end, Nicholson persuaded me, and within the week I found myself at the place. It proved to be a large, ancient house—certainly of the same vintage as so many in Arkham—which had been built in a little valley which ought to have been fertile but showed no sign of recent cultivation. It rose among gaunt pines, which crowded close on the house, and along one wall ran a broad, clear brook.

  Despite the attractiveness it offered the eye at a distance, up close it present another face. For one thing, it was painted black. For another, it wore an air of forbidding formidableness. Its curtainless windows stared outward gloomily. All around it on the ground floor ran a narrow porch which had been stuffed and crammed with bundles of sacking tied with
twine, half-rotted chairs, highboys, tables, and a singular variety of old-fashioned household objects, like a barricade designed either to keep someone or something inside or to prevent it from getting in. This barricade had manifestly been there a long time, for it showed the effects of expose to several years of weather. Its reason for being was too obscure even for the agent, to whom I wrote to ask, but it did help to lend the house a most curious air of being inhabited, though there was no sign of life, and nothing, indeed, to show that anyone had lived there for a very long time.

  But this was an illusion which never left me. It was plain to see that no one had been in the house, not even Nicholson or the agent, for the barricade extended across both front and back doors of the almost square structure, and I had to pull away a section of it in order to make an entry myself.

  Once inside, the impression of habitation was all the stronger. But there was a difference—all the gloom of the black-painted exterior was reversed inside. Here everything was light and surprisingly clean, considering the period of its abandonment. Moreover, the house was furnished, scantily, true, but furnished, whereas I had received the distinct impression that everything which had once been inside had been piled up around the house on the verandah outside.

  The house inside was as box-like as it appeared on the outside. There were four rooms below—a bedroom, a kitchen-pantry, a dining-room, a sitting-room; and upstairs, four of exactly the same dimensions—three bedrooms, and a storeroom. There were plenty of windows in all the rooms, and especially those facing north, which was gratifying, since the north light is best for painting.

  I had no use for the second storey; so I chose the bedroom on the northwest corner for my studio, and it was there that I put in my things, without regard for the bed, which I pushed aside. I had come, after all, to work at my paintings, and not for any social life whatever. And I had come amply supplied, with my car so laden that it took me most of the first day to unload and store my things, and to clear away a path from the back door, as I had cleared the front, so that I might have access to both north and south sides of the house with equal facility.

  Once settled with a lamp lit against the encroaching darkness, I took out Nicholson’s letter and read it once more, as it were, in the proper setting, taking note again of the points he made.

  “Isolation will indeed be yours. The nearest neighbors are at least a mile away. They are the Perkinses on the ridge to the south. Not far past them are the Mores. On the other side, which would make it north, are the Bowdens.

  “The reason for the long-term desertion is one which ought to appeal to you. People did not want to rent or buy it simply because it had once been occupied by one of those strange, ingrown families which are common in obscure and isolated rural areas—the Bishops, of which the last surviving member, a gaunt, lanky creature named Seth, committed a murder in the house, the one fact which the superstitious natives allow to deter them from use of either the house or the land, which, as you will see—if you had any use for it—is rich and fertile. Even a murderer could be a creative artist in his way, I suppose—but Seth, I fear, was anything but that. He seems to have been somewhat crude, and killed without any good reason—a neighbor, I understand. Simply tore him apart. Seth was a very strong man. Gives me cold chills, but hardly you. The victim was a Bowden.

  “There is a telephone, which I ordered connected.

  “The house has its own power plant, too. So it’s not as ancient as it looks. Though this was put in long after the house was originally built. It’s in the cellar, I am told. It may not be working now.

  “No waterworks, sorry. The well ought to be good, and you’ll need some exercise to keep yourself fit—you can’t keep fit sitting at an easel.

  “The house looks more isolated than it is. If you get lonely, just telephone me.”

  The power plant, of which he had written, was not working. The lights in the house were dead. But the telephone was in working order, as I ascertained by placing a call to the nearest village, which was Aylesbury.

  I was tired that first night, and went to bed early. I had brought my own bedding, of course, taking no chances on anything left for so long a time in the house, and I was soon asleep. But every instant of my initial day in the house I was aware of that vague, almost intangible conviction that the house was occupied by someone other than myself, though I knew how absurd this was for I had made a thorough tour of the house and premises soon after I had first entered it, and had found no place where anyone might be concealed.

  Every house, as no sensitive persons needs to be told, has its own individual atmosphere. It is not only the smell of word, or of brick, old stone, paint—no, it is also a sort of residue of people who have lived there and of events which have transpired within its walls. The atmosphere of the Bishop house challenged description. There was the customary smell of age, which I expected, of dampness rising from the cellar, but there was something beyond this and of greater importance, something which actually lent the house itself an aura of life, as if it were a sleeping animal waiting with infinite patience for something, which it knew must happen, to take place.

  It was not, let me say at once, anything to prompt uneasiness. It did not seem to me in that first week to have about it any element of dread or fear, and it did not occur to me to be at all disquieted until one morning in my second week—after I had already completed two imaginative canvasses, and was at work outside on a third. I was conscious that morning of being scrutinized; at first I told myself, jokingly, that of course the house was watching me, for its windows did look like blank eyes peering out of that sombre black; but presently I knew that my observer stood somewhere to the rear, and from time to time I flashed glances toward the edge of the little woods which rose southwest of the house.

  At last I located the hidden watcher. I turned to face the bushes where he was concealed, and said, “Come on out; I know you’re there.”

  At that a tall, freckle-faced young man rose up and stood looking at me with hard, dark eyes, manifestly suspicious and belligerent.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  He nodded, without saying anything.

  “If you’re interested, come on up and have a look,” I said.

  He thawed a little and stepped out of the bushes. He was, I saw now, perhaps twenty. He was clad in jeans, and was barefooted, a lithe young fellow, well-muscled, and undoubtedly quick and alert. He walked forward a little way, coming just close enough so the he could see what I was doing, and there stopped. He favored me with a frank examination. Finally he spoke.

  “Your name Bishop?”

  Of course, the neighbors might understandably think that a member of the family had turned up in some remote corner of the earth and come back to claim the abandoned property. The name of Jefferson Bates would mean nothing to him. Moreover, I was curiously reluctant to tell him my name, which I could not understand. I answered civilly enough that my name was not Bishop, that I was not a relative, that I had only rented the house for the summer and perhaps a month or two in the fall.

  “My name’s Perkins,” he said. “Bud Perkins. From up yonder.” He gestured toward the ridge to the south.

  “Glad to know you.”

  “You been here a week,” Bud continued, offering proof that my arrival had not gone unnoticed in the valley. “You’re still here.”

  There was a note of surprise in his voice, as if the fact of my being in the Bishop house after a week was strange of itself.

  “I mean,” he went on, “nothing’s happened to you. What with all the goins-on in this house, it’s a wonder.”

  “What goings-on?” I asked bluntly.

  “Don’t you know?” he asked, open-mouthed.

  “I know about Seth Bishop.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “That ain’t near the all of it, Mister. I wouldn’t set foot in that house if I was paid for it—and paid good. Makes my spine prickle jest to be standing this near it.” He frowned darkly. “It�
�s a place should-a been burned down long ago. What were them Bishops doing all hours of the night?”

  “Looks clean,” I said. “It’s comfortable enough. Not even a mouse in it.”

  “Hah! If ’twas only mice! You wait.”

  With that he turned and plunged back into the woods.

  I realized, of course, that many local superstitions must have arisen about the abandoned Bishop house; what more natural than that it should be haunted? Nevertheless, Bud Perkins’ left a disagreeable impression with me. Clearly, I had been under secret observation ever sine my arrival; I understood that new neighbors are always of interest to people, but I also perceived that the interest of my neighbors in this isolated spot was not of quite that nature. They expected something to happen; they were waiting for it to take place; and only the fact that nothing had as yet occurred had brought Bud Perkins within range.

  That night the first untoward “incident” took place. Quite possible Bud Perkins’ oblique comments had set the stage by preparing me for something to happen. In any case, the “incident” was so nebulous as to be almost negative, and there were a dozen explanations for it; it is only in the light of later events that I remember it at all. It happened perhaps two hours after midnight.

  I was awakened from sleep by an unusual sound. Now, anyone sleeping in a new place grows accustomed to the sounds of the night in that region, and, once accustomed to them, accepts them in sleep; but any new sound is apt to obtrude. Just as a city-dweller spending several nights on a farm may accustom himself to the noises of chickens, birds, the wind, frogs, may be awakened by the new note of a toad trilling because it is strange to the chorus to which he has become accustomed, so I was aware of a new sound in the chorus of whippoorwills, owls, and nocturnal insects which invaded the night.