I could feel his animosity.
“That’s the way it was when Seth Bishop was here. We ain’t sure he’s not still here.”
I felt a curious coldness come over me at his words, and at that instant, the house behind me, for all its looming terrors, seemed more inviting than the darkness outside, where Bud and his neighbors stood vigil with weapons as lethal as anything I might find within those black walls. Perhaps Seth Bishop, too, had met this kind of hatred; perhaps the furniture had never been moved back into the house because it made a barrier against bullets.
I turned and went back into the house without a further word.
Inside, all was now quiet. There was not a sound anywhere. I had previously thought it somewhat unusual that not a sign of mouse or rat had existed in the abandoned house, knowing how quickly these small animals take over a house; now I would have welcomed the sound of their scampering to and fro or gnawing. But there was nothing, only a deathly, pregnant stillness, as if the house itself knew it was ringed around with grim, determined men armed against a horror they could not know.
It was late when at last I slept that night.
IV
My sense of time was not effective in those weeks, as I have already set down. If my memory now serves me rightly, there was a lull of almost a month after that night. I discovered that, gradually, the guards had been withdrawn; only Bud Perkins remained, and he stayed grimly night after night.
It must have been at least five weeks later when I woke from sleep one night and found myself in the passage below the house, walking toward the cellar, away from the yawning chasm at the far end. What had awakened me was a sound to which I was unaccustomed—a screaming which could have come only from a human voice, far behind me. I listened in cold horror, and yet somewhat lethargically, while the screams of fright rose and fell, and were cut off terribly at last. Then I stood for a long time in that place, unable to move forward or back, waiting for a resumption of that frightening sound. But it did not come again, and at last I made my way back to my room and fell exhausted on my bed.
I woke that next morning with a premonition of what was to come.
And in mid-morning, it came. A sullen, hateful mob of men and women, most of them armed. Fortunately, they were in charge of a deputy-sheriff, who kept them in a semblance of order. Though they had no search warrant, they demanded the right to search the house. In the face of their mood, it would have been folly to deny them; so I made no attempt to do so. I stepped outside and left the door stand open for them. They surged into the house, and I could hear them going through room after room, upstairs and down, moving and throwing things about. I made no protest, for I was stoutly guarded by three men, one of whom was Obed marsh, the storekeeper from Aylesbury.
It was to him I finally addressed myself in as calm a voice as I could muster. “May I ask what this is all about?”
“You sayin’ you don’t know?” he asked scornfully.
“I don’t.”
“Jared More’s boy disappeared last night. Walkin’ home from a school party up the road a piece. He had to come by here.”
There was nothing I could say. It was patent that they believed the boy had vanished into this house. However much I wanted to protest, I could not rid my thoughts of the memory of that terrible screaming I had heard in the tunnel. I did not know who had screamed, and I knew now that I did not want to learn. I felt reasonably sure that they would not find the entrance to the tunnel, for it was artfully concealed behind shelving in that small cellar space, but from moment forward I stood in an agony of suspense, for I had little doubt about what would happen to me if by some chance anything belonging to the missing boy should be found on the premises.
But again a merciful Providence intervened to prevent my discovery—if there were one to be made; I dared to hope that my own fears were groundless. In truth, I did not know, but horrible doubts were now beginning to assail me. How came I in the tunnel? And whence? When I had awakened, I had been on the way back from the water’s edge. What had I done there—and had I left anything behind?
By twos and threes, the mob came out of the house again, empty-handed. They were no less sullen, no less angry—but they were somewhat dubious and bewildered. If they had expected to find anything, they were sharply disappointed. If the missing boy had not been taken to the Bishop house, they could not imagine where he might have gone.
Urged by the deputy-sheriff, who had given them their way, they now drew back from the house and began to disperse, all but Bud Perkins and a handful of equally grim men, who remained on guard.
Then for days I was aware of the oppressive hatred which was directed toward the Bishop house and its lone occupant.
Thereafter came an interval of comparative quiet.
And then that final catastrophic night!
It began with faint intimations of something stirring below. I suppose I was subconsciously aware of movement even before I was conscious of it. At the time I was reading in that hellish manuscript book of Seth Bishop’s—a page devoted to the minions of Great Cthulhu, the Deep Ones who devoured sacrifice of warm-blooded animals, being themselves cold-blooded, and waxing fat and strong on what would seem a kind of pagan cannibalism; I was reading this, I say, when without warning I became conscious of the stirrings below, as if the earth were becoming animated, trembling faintly, rhythmically, and there began immediately thereafter a faint, far-away music, exactly similar to that which I had heard in my first dream in that house, rising from instruments unknown to human hands, but resembling a fluting or piping sound heard in chorus, and accompanied once more by an occasional ululation which came from the throat of some living entity.
I cannot adequately describe the effect which this had on me. At the moment, engrossed as I was in an account clearly related to the events of the past weeks, I was, as it were, conditioned to such an occurrence, but my state of mind was one of nothing short of exaltation, and I was filled with a compelling urgence to rise and serve Him who lay dreaming far below. Almost as in a dream, I put out the light in the storeroom, and slipped out in darkness, possessed by caution against the enemies who waited beyond the walls.
As yet, the music was too faint to be heard outside the house. I had no way of knowing how long it would remain so faint; so I made haste to do that which was expected of me before the enemy could be warned that the dwellers in the watery chasm below were once again rising toward the house in the valley. But it was not to the cellar that I moved. As if by pre-ordained plan, I slipped out the back door of the house and made my way stealthily in the darkness to the protecting shrubbery and trees.
There I began to make slow but steady progress forward. Somewhere up ahead Bud Perkins stood on guard … . .
Of what happened after that, I cannot be sure.
The rest was nightmare, certainly. Before I reached Bud Perkins, two shots rang out. That was his signal to the others to come. I was less than a foot away from him in the darkness, and his shots startled me out of my wits. He, too, had heard the sounds from below, for now I could hear them outside in the darkness as well.
So much I remember with reasonable clarity.
It was what happened after that that baffles me even now. Certainly the mob came, and if the men from the sheriff’s office had not been waiting, too, I would not now be alive to make this deposition. I remember the screaming, furious mob; I remember that they set fire to the house. I had been back there, I had run out, escaping the flames, but that other sight—those shrilly crying Deep Ones, falling victim to flame and terror, and at the last that gigantic being which reared up out of the flames flailing its tentacles, before it dropped defiantly back down, compacting into a great sinuous column of flesh, and vanished without trace! It was then that someone in the mob threw dynamite into the flaming house. But even before the echo of the blast had died away, I heard, as did all the others encircling all that remained of the Bishop house, that changing voice which cried. “Ph’nglui mglw’naf
h Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!” —announcing to all the world that Great Cthulhu still lay dreaming in his subaqueous haven of R’lyeh!
They said of me that I was crouched beside the torn remains of Bud Perkins, and they intimated hideous things. Yet they must have seen, even as I saw, what writhed in that flaming ruin, though they deny that there was anything at all there but myself. What they say I was doing is too horrible to repeat. It is the fiction of their diseased, hatefilled brains, for surely they cannot deny the evidence of their own senses. They witnessed against me in court, and sealed my doom.
Surely they must understand that it was not I who did all the things they say I did! Surely they must know that it was the life-force of Seth Bishop, which invaded and took possession of me, which again restored that unholy link to those creatures of the deeps, bringing them their food, as in the days when Seth Bishop had an existence in a body of his own and served them, even as the Deep Ones and those countless others scattered over the face of the earth, Seth Bishop who did what they say I did to Bud Perkin’s sheep and Jared More’s boy and all those missing animals and finally to Bud Perkins himself, for all that he made them believe it was I, for I could not have done such things, it was Seth Bishop come back from hell to serve again those hideous beings who came to his watery pit from the depths of the sea, Seth Bishop, who had discovered their existence and summoned them to do his bidding and who lived to serve them in his own time and in mine, and who may still lurk deep in earth below that place where the house stood in the valley, waiting for another vessel to inhabit and so serve them in time to come, forever.
The Seal of R’lyeh
MY PATERNAL GRANDFATHER, whom I never saw except in a darkened room, used to say of me to my parents, “Keep him away from the sea!” as if I had some reason to fear water, when, in fact, I have always been drawn to it. But those born under one of the water signs—mine is Pisces—have a natural affinity for water, so much is well known. They are said to be psychic, too, but that is another matter, perhaps. At any rate, that was my grandfather’s judgement; a strange man, whom I could not have described to save my soul—though that, in the light of day, is an ambiguity indeed! That was before my father was killed in an automobile accident, and afterward it was never said in vain, for my mother kept me back in the hills, well away from the sight and sound and the smells of the sea.
But what is meant to be will be. I was in college in a mid-western city when my mother died, and the week after, my Uncle Sylvan died too, leaving everything he had to me. Him I had never seen. He was the eccentric one of the family, the queer one, the black sheep; he was known by a variety of names, and disparaged in all of them, except by my grandfather, who did not speak of him at all without sighing. I was, in fact, the last of my grandfather’s direct line; there was a great-uncle living somewhere—in Asia, I always understood, though what he did there no one seemed to know, except that it had something to do with the sea, shipping, perhaps—and so it was only natural that I should inherit my Uncle Sylvan’s places.
For he had two, and both, as luck would have it, were on the sea, one in a Massachusetts town called Innsmouth, and the other isolated on the coast well above that town. Even after the inheritance taxes, there was enough money to make it unnecessary for me to go back to college, or to do anything I had no mind to do, and the only thing I had a mind to do was that which had been forbidden me for these twenty-two years, to go to the sea, perhaps to buy a sailboat or a yacht or whatever I liked.
But that was not quite the way it was to be. I saw the lawyer in Boston and went on to Innsmouth. A strange town, I found it. Not friendly, though there were those who smiled when they learned who I was, smiled with a strange, secretive air, as if they knew something they would not say of my Uncle Sylvan. Fortunately, the place at Innsmouth was the lesser of his places; it was plain that he had not occupied it much; it was a dreary, somber old mansion, and I discovered, much to my surprise, that it was the family homestead, having been built by my great-grandfather, who had been in the China trade, and lived in by my grandfather for a good share of his life, and the name of Phillips was still held in a kind of awe in that town.
No, it was the other place in which my Uncle Sylvan had spent most of his life. He was only fifty when he died, but he had lived much like my grandfather; he had not been seen about much, being seldom away from that darkly overgrown house which crowned a rocky bluff on the coast above Innsmouth. It was not a lovely house, not such a one as would call to the lover of beauty, but it had its own attraction, nevertheless, and I felt it at once. I thought of it as a house that belonged to the sea, for the sound of the Atlantic was always in it, and trees shut it from the land, while to the sea it was open, its wide windows looking ever east. It was not an old house, like that other—thirty years, I was told—though it had been built by my uncle himself on the site of a far older house that had belonged to my great-grandfather, too.
It was a house of many rooms, but of them all the great central study was the only room to remember. Though all the rest of the house was of one storey, rambling away from that central room, that room had the height of two storeys, and was sunken besides, with its walls covered with books and all manner of curios, particularly outré and suggestive carvings and sculptures, paintings and masks which came from many places of the world, but especially from the Polynesias, from Aztec, Maya, and Inca country, and from ancient Indians tribes in the northwest coastal areas of the North American continent—a fascinating and ever provocative collection which had originally been begun by my grandfather, and continued and added to by my Uncle Sylvan. A great hand-made rug, bearing a strange octopoid design, covered the center of the floor, and all the furniture in the room was set between the walls and the center of it; nothing at all stood on that rug.
There was above all else a symbolization in the decor of the house. Here and there, woven into rugs—beginning with that great round rug in the central room—into hangings, or plaques—was a design which seemed to be of a singularly perplexing seal, a round, disc-like pattern bearing on it a crude likeness of the astronomical symbol of Aquarius, the water-carrier—a likeness that might have been drawn remote ages ago, when the shape of Aquarius was not as it is today—surmounting a hauntingly indefinite suggestion of a buried city, against which, in the precise center of the disc, was imposed an indescribable figure that was at once ichthyic and saurian, simultaneously octopoid and semihuman, which, though drawn in miniature, was clearly intended to represent a colossus in someone’s imagination. Finally, in letters so fine that the eye could hardly read them, the disc was ringed round with meaningless words in a language I could not read, though far down inside of me it seemed to strike a common chord—Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
That this curious design should have exercised upon me from the beginning the strongest possible attraction did not seem at all strange, though its significance did not come to me until later. Nor could I account for the unimaginably strong pull of the sea; though I had never before set foot in this place, I had the most vivid impression of having returned home. Never, in all my years, had my parents taken me east; I had not before been east of Ohio, and the closest I had come to any substantial body of water had been in brief visits to Lake Michigan or Lake Huron. That this undeniable attraction existed so patently I laid quite naturally to ancestral memory—had not my forebears lived by the sea, on it and beside it? For how many generations? Two of which I knew, and perhaps more before that. They had been mariners for generations, until something happened that caused my grandfather to strike far inland, and to shun the sea thereafter, and cause it to be shunned by all who came after him.
I mention this now because its meaning comes clear in all that happened afterward, which I am dedicated to setting down before I am gone to be among my own people again. The house and the sea drew me; together they were home, and gave more meaning to that word even than the haven I had shared so fondly with my doting pare
nts only a few years before. A strange thing—and yet, stranger still, I did not think it so at the time; it seemed the most natural occurrence, and I did not question it.
Of what manner of man my Uncle Sylvan was, I had no way of knowing at once. I did find an early portrait of him, done by an amateur photographer. It was a likeness of an unusually grave young man, surely not more than twenty, to judge by his appearance, and of an aspect which, while not exactly unattractive, was doubtless repellent to many people, for he had a face which suggested something more than just the humanness of him—with his somewhat flat nose, his very wide mouth, his strangely basilisk eyes. There was no more recent photograph of him, but there were people who remembered him from the years when he still walked or drove into Innsmouth to shop, as I learned on a day I stopped into Asa Clarke’s store to buy my supplies for the week.
“Ye’re a Phillips?” asked the aged proprietor.
I admitted that I was.
“Son of Sylvan?”
“My uncle never married,” I said.
“We’ve had naught but his word for that,” he replied. “Then ye’ll be Jared’s son. How is he?”
“Dead.”
The old man shook his head. “Dead, too, eh? —the last of that generation, then. And you …”
“I’m the last of mine.”
“The Phillipses were once high and mighty hereabouts. An old family—but ye’ll know it.”
I said I did not. I had come from the midwest, and had little knowledge of my forebears.
“That so?” He gazed at me for a moment almost in disblief. “Well, the Phillipses go back about as far as the Marshes. The two were in business long ago, together. China trade. Shipped from here and Boston for the Orient—Japan, China, the islands—and they brought back—“ But here he stopped, his face paled a little, and he shrugged. “Many things. Aye, many things indeed.” He gave me a baffling look. “Ye figurin’ to stay hereabouts?”
The Mask of Cthulhu Page 15