I told him I had inherited and moved into my uncle’s place on the coast. I was now looking for servants to staff it.
“Ye’ll not find ’em,” he said, shaking his head. “The place is too far up the coast, and much disliked. If any more of the Phillipses were left—“He spread his hands helplessly. “But most of them died in ’28, that time of the explosions and the fire. Still, ye might find a Marsh or two who’d do for you; they’re still about. Not so many of ’em died that night.”
With this oblique and mystifying reference I was not then concerned. My first thought was of someone to help me at my uncle’s house. “Marsh,” I repeated. “Can you name one and give me his address?”
“There is one,” he said thoughtfully, and then smiled, as if to himself.
That was how I came to meet Ada Marsh.
She was twenty-five, but there were days when she looked much younger, and other days when she looked older. I went to her home, found her, asked her to come to work for me days. She had a car of her own, even if but an old-fashioned Model T; she could drive up and back; and the prospect of working in what she called strangely, “Sylvan’s hiding,” seemed to appeal to her. Indeed, she seemed almost eager to come, and promised to come that day still, if I wished her to. She was not a good-looking girl, but, like my uncle, she was strangely attractive to me, however much she may have turned others away; there was a certain charm about her wide, flat-lipped mouth, and her eyes, which were undeniably cold, seemed often very warm to me.
She came the following morning, and it was plain to me that she had been in the house before, for she walked about as if she knew it.
“You’ve been here before!” I challenged her.
“The Marshes and the Phillipses are old friends,” she said, and looked at me as if I must have known. And indeed, I felt at that moment as if I did certainly know it was just as she said. “Old, old friends—as old, Mr. Phillips, as the earth itself is old. As old as the water-carrier and the water.”
She too was strange. She had been here, as a guest of Uncle Sylvan, I found out, more than once. Now, without hesitation, she had come to work for me, and with such a curious simile on his lips—“as old as the water-carrier and the water” —which made me to think of the design which lay all about us, and for the first time, I now believe, thinking back upon it, implanting in me a certain feeling of uneasiness; for the second moment of it was but a few words away.
“Have you heard, Mr. Phillips?” she asked then.
“Heard what?” I asked.
“If you had heard, you would not need to be told.”
But her real purpose was not to come to work for me, I soon found out; it was to have access to the house, as I learned when I came back up from the beach ahead of schedule, and found her engrossed not in work, but in a systematic and detailed search of the great central room. I watched her for a while—how she moved books, leafed through them; how she carefully lifted the pictures on the walls, the sculptures on the shelves, looking into every place where something might be hidden. I went back and slammed the door then; so that when I walked into the study, she was at work dusting, quite as if she had never been at anything else.
It was my impulse to speak, but I foresaw that it would not do to tip my hand. If she sought something, perhaps I could find it first. So I said nothing, and that evening, after she had gone, I took up where she had stopped, not knowing what to look for, but being able to estimate something of its size by the very fact of the places into which she had looked. Something compact, small, hardly larger than a book itself.
Could it be a book? I asked myself repeatedly that night.
For, of course, I found nothing, though I sought until midnight, and gave up only when I was exhausted, satisfied that I had gone further in my search than Ada could go on the morrow, even if she had most the day. I sat down to rest in one of the overstuffed chairs ranged close to the walls in that room, and there had my first hallucination—I call it so for want of a better, more precise word. For I was far from sleep when I heard a sound that like nothing so much as the susurrus of some great beast’s breathing; and, wakened in a trice, was sure that the house itself, and the rock on which it sat, and the sea lapping at the rocks below were at one in breathing, like various parts of one great sentient being, and I felt as I had often felt when looking at the paintings of certain contemporary artists—Dale Nichols in particular—who have seen earth and the contours of the land as representative of a great sleeping man or woman—felt as if I rested on chest or belly or forehead of a being so vast I could not comprehend its vastness.
I do not remember how long the illusion lasted. I kept thinking of Ada Marsh’s question, “Have you heard?” Was it this she meant? For surely the house and the rock on which it stood were alive, and as restless as the sea that flowed away to the horizon to the east. I sat experiencing the illusion for a long time. Did the house actually tremble as if in respiration? I believed it did, and at the time I laid it to some flaw in its structure, and accounted in its strange movement and sounds for the reluctance of other natives to work for me.
On the third day I confronted Ada in the midst of her search.
“What are you looking for, Ada?” I asked.
She measured me with the utmost candor, and decided that I had seen her thus before.
“Your uncle was in search of something I thought maybe he had found. I too am interested in it. Perhaps you would be, too, if you know. You are like us—you are one of us—of the Marshes and the Phillipses before you.”
“What would it be?”
“A notebook, a diary, a journal, papers …” She shrugged. “Your uncle spoke very little of it to me, but I know. He was gone very often, long periods at a time. Where was he then? Perhaps he had reached his goal. For he never went away by road.”
“Perhaps I can find it.”
She shook her head. “You know too little. You are like…an outsider.”
“Will you tell me?”
“No. Who speaks so to one too young to understand? No, Mr. Phillips, I will say nothing. You are not ready.”
I resented this, and I resented her. Yet I did not ask her to leave. Her attitude was a provocation and a challenge.
II
Two days later I came upon that which Ada Marsh sought.
My Uncle Sylvan’s papers were concealed in a place where Ada Marsh had looked first—behind a shelf of curious, occult books, but set into a secret recess there, which I happened to open only by clumsy chance. A journal of sorts, and many scraps and sheets of paper, covered with tiny scripts in what I recognized as my uncle’s hand. I took them at once to my own room and locked myself in, as if I feared that at this hour, at dead of night, Ada Marsh might come for them. An absurd thing to do—for I not only did not fear her, but actually was drawn to her far more than I would have dreamed I might be when first I met her.
Beyond question, the discovery of the papers represented a turning point in my existence. Say that my first twenty-two years were static, on a waiting plane; say that the early days at my Uncle Sylvan’s coast house were a time of suspension between that earlier plane and that which was to come; the turning point came surely with my discovery—and yes, reading—of the papers.
But what was I to make of the first paragraph on which I gazed?
“Subt. Cont. shelf. Northernmost end at Inns., stretching all the way around to vic. Singapore. Orig. source off Ponape? A. suggests R. in Pacific, vic. of Ponape; E. holds
R. nr. Inns. Maj. writers suggest it in depths. Could R. occupy entire Cont. shelf from
Inns. to Singapore?”
That was the first. The second was even more baffling.
“C. who waits dreaming in R. is all in all, and everywhere. He is in R. at Inns. and
at Ponape, he is among the islands and in the depths. How are the Deep Ones related?
And where did Obad. and Cyrus make the first contact? Ponape or one of the lesser islands? And how? On land
or in the water?”
But my uncle’s papers were not alone in that treasure trove. There were other, even more disturbing revelations. The letter, for instance, from the Rev. Jabez Lovell Phillips to some unnamed person, dated over a century before, in which he wrote:
“On a certain day in August of 1797, Capt. Obadiah Marsh, accompanied by his First Mate Cyrus Alcott Phillips, reported their ship, the Cory, lost with all hands in the Marquesas. The Captain and his First Mate arrived in Innsmouth harbor in a rowboat, yet did not seem any the worse for weather or wear, despite having covered a distance of many thousands of miles in a craft deemed well nigh impossible of having carried them so far. Thereafter began in Innsmouth such a series of happenings as were to make the settlement accursed within one generation, for a strange race was born to the Marshes and the Phillipses, a blight was fallen upon their families which followed after the appearance of women—and how came they there? —who were the wives of the Captain and his First Mate, and loosed upon Innsmouth a spawn of Hell that no man has found it possible to put down, and against whom all the appeals to Heaven I have made to no avail.
“What disports in the waters off Innsmouth in the late hours of darkness? Mermaids, say some. Faugh, what idiocy! Mermaids, indeed. What, if not the accursed spawn of the Marsh and Phillips tribes… .”
Of this I read no more, being curiously shaken. I turned next to my uncle’s journal, and found the last entry:
“R. is as I thought. Next time I shall see C. himself, where he lies in the depths, waiting upon the day to come forth once more.”
But there had been no next time for Uncle Sylvan—only death. There were entries before this one, many of them; clearly, my uncle wrote of matters beyond my knowledge. He wrote of Cthulhu and R’lyeh, of Hastur and Lloigor, of Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth, of the Plateau of Leng, of the Sussex Fragments and the Necronomicon, of the Marsh Drift and the Abominable Snowmen—but, most often of all, he wrote of R’lyeh, and of Great Cthulhu—the “R.” and the “C.” of his papers—and of his abiding search for them, for my uncle, as was made plain in his own handwriting, was in search of these places or beings, I could hardly distinguish one from the other in the way he set down his thoughts, for his notes and his journal were written for no other eyes but his own, and he alone understood them, for I had no frame of reference upon which to draw.
There was, too, a crude map drawn by some hand before my Uncle Sylvan’s, for it was old and badly creased; it fascinated me, though I had no genuine understanding of its real worth. It was a rough map of the world—but not of that world I knew or had learned about in my studies; rather of a world that existed only in the imagination of him who had made the map. For deep in the heart of Asia, for instance, the mapmaker had fixed the “Pl. Leng,” and above this, near what ought to have been Mongolia, “Kadath in the Cold Waste,” which was specified as “in space-time continua; coterminous,” and in the sea about the Polynesians, he had indicated the “Marsh drift,” which, I gathered, was a break in the ocean floor. Devil Reef off Innsmouth was indicated, too, and so was Ponape—these were recognizable; but the majority of place-names on that fabulous map were utterly alien to me.
I hid the things I had found where I was sure Ada Marsh would not think of looking for them, and I returned, late though the hour was, to the central room. And there I sought out, as if by instinct, unerringly, the shelf behind which the things I had found had been concealed. There were some of the things mentioned in Uncle Sylvan’s notes—the Sussex Fragments, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Cultes des Goules, by the Comte d’Erlette, the Book of Eibon, Von Junzt’s Unausprechlichen Kulten, and many others. But alas! Most of them were in Latin or Greek, which I could not read well, however ably I could struggle through French or German. Yet I found enough in those pages to fill me with wonder and terror, with horror and a strangely exhilarating excitement, as if I had realized that my Uncle Sylvan had bequeathed me not only his house and property, but his quest and the lore of aeons before the time of man.
For I sat reading until the morning sun invaded the room and paled the lamps I had lit—reading about the Great Old Ones, who were first among the universes, and the Elder Gods, who fought and vanquished the rebellious Ancient Ones—who were Great Cthulhu, the water-dweller; Hastur, who reposed at the Lake of Hali in the Hyades; Yog-Sothoth, the All-in-One and One-in-All; Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker; Lloigor, the Star-Treader; Cthugha, who abides in fire; great Azathoth—all of whom had been vanquished and exiled to outer spaces against the coming of another day in far time yet to come, when they could rise with their followers and once again vanquish the races of mankind and challenge the Elder Gods; of their minions—the Deep Ones of the seas and the water places on Earth, the Dholes, the Abominable Snowmen of Tibet and the hidden Plateau of Leng, the Shantaks, who flew from Kadath in the Cold Waste at the bidding of the Wind-Walker, the Wendigo, cousin of Ithaqua; of their rivalries, one and yet divided. I read all this and more—damnably more: the collection of newspaper clippings of inexplicable happenings, accounted for by Uncle Sylvan as evidence of the truth in which he believed. And in the pages of these books was more of the curious language I had found woven into the decorations of my uncle’s house—Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn—which was translated, I read in more than one of these accounts, as: “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming …”
And my uncle’s quest was surely nothing more than to find R’lyeh, the sunken subaqueous place of Cthulhu!
In the cold light of day, I challenged my own conclusions. Could my Uncle Sylvan have believed in such a panoply of myths? Or was his pursuit merely the quest of a man steeped in idleness? My uncle’s library consisted of many books, ranging through the world’s literature; yet one considerable section of his shelving was given over completely to books on occult subjects, books of strange beliefs and even stranger facts, inexplicable to science, books on little-known religious cults; and these were supplemented by huge scrapbooks of clippings from newspapers and magazines, reading which filled me at one and the same time with a sense of premonitory dread and a flame of compulsive joy. For in these prosaically reported facts there lay oddly convincing evidence to augment belief in the myth-pattern to which my uncle had patently subscribed.
After all, the pattern in itself was not new. All religious beliefs, all myth-patterns, in no matter what systems of culture, are basically familiar—they are predicated upon a struggle between forces of good and forces of evil. This pattern was part, too, of my uncle’s mythos—the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods, who may, for all I could figure out, have been the same, represented primal good; the Ancient Ones, primal evil. As in many cultures, the Elder Gods were not often named; the Ancient Ones were, and often, for they were still worshipped and served by followers throughout earth and among the planetary spaces; and they were aligned not only against the Elder Gods, but also against one another in a ceaseless struggle for ultimate dominion. They were, in brief, representations of elemental forces, and each had his element—Cthulhu of water, Cthugha of fire, Ithaqua of air, Hastur of interplanetary spaces; and others among them belonged to great primal forces—Shub-Niggurath, the Messenger of the Gods, of fertility; Yog-Sothoth, of the time-space continua, Azathoth—in a sense the fountainhead of evil.
Was this pattern after all not familiar? The Elder Gods could so easily have become the Christian Trinity; the Ancient Ones could for most believers have been altered into Sathanus and Beelzebub, Mephistofeles and Azarael. Except that they were co-existent, which disturbed me, though I knew that systems of belief constantly overlapped in the history of mankind.
More—there was certain evidence to show that the Cthulhu myth-pattern had existed not only long before the Christian mythos, but also before that of ancient China and the dawn of mankind, surviving unchanged in remote areas of the earth—among the Tcho-Tcho people of Tibet, and the Abominable Snowmen of the high plateaus of Asia, and a strange sea-dwelling people known a
s the Deep Ones, who were amphibian hybrids, bred of ancient matings between humanoids and batrachia, mutant developments of the race of man—; surviving with recognizable facets in newer religious symbols—in Quetzalcoatl and others among the Gods of Aztec, Mayan, and Inca religions; in the idols of Easter Island; in the ceremonial masks of the Polynesians and the Northwest Coast Indians, where the tentacle and octopoid shape which were the marks of Cthulhu persisted;—so that in a sense it might be said that the Cthulhu mythos was primal.
Even putting all this into the realm of theory and speculation, I was left with the tremendous amounts of clippings which my uncle had collected. These prosaic newspaper accounts served perhaps more effectively in giving pause to any doubt I might have had because all were so palpably reportorial, for none of my uncle’s clippings derived from any sensational source, all came straight from news columns or magazines offering factual material only, like the National Geographic. So that I was left asking myself certain searching questions.
What did happen to Johansen and the ship Emma if not what he himself set forth? Was any other explanation possible?
And why did the U. S. Government send destroyers and submarines to depth-bomb the ocean about Devil Reef outside the harbor of Innsmouth? And arrest scores of Innsmouth people who were never afterward seen again? And fire the coastal area, destroying scores of others? Why—if it were not true that strange rites were being observed by Innsmouth people who bore a hellish relationship to certain sea-dwellers seen by night at Devil Reef?
And what happened to Wilmarth in the mountain country of Vermont, when he came too close to the truth in his research into the cults of the Ancient Ones? And to certain writers of what purported to be fiction—Lovecraft, Howard, Barlow—and what purported to be science—like Fort—when they came too close to the truth? Dead, all of them. Dead or missing, like Wilmarth. Dead before their time, most of them, while still comparatively young men. My uncle had their books—though only Lovecraft and Fort had been extensively published in book form—and they were opened by me and read, with greater perturbation that ever, for the fictions of H. P. Lovecraft had, it seemed to me, the same relation to truth as the facts, so inexplicable to science, reported by Charles Fort. If fiction, Lovecraft’s tales were damnably bound to fact—even dismissing Fort’s facts, the fact inherent in the myths of mankind; they were quasi-myths themselves, as was the untimely fate of their author, whose early death had already given rise to a score of legends, from among which prosaic fact was ever more and more difficult to discover.
The Mask of Cthulhu Page 16