Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  I shook my head.

  “That wailing night before last,” said Laird. “The sounds Professor Gardner heard—and now this. It ties up—damnably, horribly.” He turned on me with intense and fixed urgence. “Jack, are you game to visit that slab tonight?”

  “Certainly.”

  “We’ll do it.”

  It was not until we were inside the lodge that we thought of the dictaphone, and then Laird prepared at once to play whatever had been recorded back to us. Here at least, he reflected, was nothing dependent in any way upon anyone’s imagination; here was the product of the machine, pure and simple, and everyone of intelligence knew full well that machines were far more dependable than men, having neither nerves nor imagination, knowing neither fear nor hope. I think that at most we counted upon hearing a repetition of the sounds of the previous night; not in our wildest dreams did we look forward to what we did actually hear, for the record mounted from the prosaic to the incredible, from the incredible to the horrible, and at last to a cataclysmic revelation that left us completely cut away from every credo of normal existence.

  It began with the occasional singing of loons and owls, followed by a period of silence. Then there was once more that familiar rushing sound, as of wind in the trees, and this was followed by the curious cacophonous piping of flutes. Then there was recorded a series of sounds, which I put down here exactly as we heard them in that unforgettable evening hour:

  Ygnaiih! Ygnaiih! EEE-ya-ya-ya-yahaaahaaahaaa-ah-ah-ah-ngh’aaa-ngh’aaa-ya-ya-yaaa! (In a voice that was neither human nor bestial, but yet of both.)

  (An increased tempo in the music, becoming more wild and demoniac.)

  Mighty Messenger—Nyarlathotep … from the world of Seven Suns to his earth place, the Wood of N’gai, whither may come Him Who Is Not to Be Named.… There shall be abundance of those from the Black Goat of the Woods, the Goat with the Thousand Young.… (In a voice that was curiously human.)

  (A succession of odd sounds, as if audience-response: a buzzing and humming, as of telegraph wires.)

  Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Ygnaiih! Ygnaiih! EEE-yaa-yaa—haa-haaa-haaaa! (In the original voice neither human nor beast, yet both.)

  Ithaqua shall serve thee, Father of the million favored ones, and Zhar shall be summoned from Arcturus, by the command of ’Umr at-Tawil, Guardian of the Gate.… Ye shall unite in praise of Azathoth, of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua.… (The human voice again.)

  Go forth in his form or in whatever form chosen in the guise of man, and destroy that which may lead them to us.… (The half-bestial, half-human voice once more.)

  (An interlude of furious piping, accompanied once again by a sound as of the flapping of great wings.)

  Ygnaiih! Y’bthnk … b’ehye-n’grkdl’lh … Iä! Iä! Iä! (Like a chorus.)

  These sounds had been spaced in such a way that it seemed as if the beings giving rise to them were moving about within or around the lodge, and the last choral chanting faded away, as if the creatures were departing. Indeed, there followed such an interval of silence that Laird had actually moved to shut off the machine when once again a voice came from it. But the voice that now emanated from the dictaphone was one which, simply because of its nature, brought to a climax all the horror so cumulative in what had gone before it; for whatever had been inferred by the half-bestial bellowings and chants, the horribly suggestive conversation in accented English, that which now came from the dictaphone was unutterably terrible:

  Dorgan! Laird Dorgan! Can you hear me?

  A hoarse, urgent whisper calling out to my companion, who sat white-faced now, staring at the machine above which his hand was still poised. Our eyes met. It was not the appeal, it was not everything that had gone before, it was the identity of that voice—for it was the voice of Professor Upton Gardner! But we had no time to ponder this, for the dictaphone went mechanically on.

  “Listen to me! Leave this place. Forget. But before you go, summon Cthugha. For centuries this has been the place where evil beings from outermost cosmos have touched upon earth. I know. I am theirs. They have taken me, as they took Piregard and many others—all who came unwarily within their wood and whom they did not at once destroy. It is His wood—the Wood of N’gai, the terrestrial abode of the Blind, Faceless One, the Howler in the Night, the Dweller in Darkness, Nyarlathotep, who fears only Cthugha. I have been with him in the star spaces. I have been on the shunned Plateau of Leng—to Kadath in the Cold Waste, beyond the Gates of the Silver Key, even to Kythamil near Arcturus and Mnar, to N’kai and the Lake of Hali, to K’n-yan and fabled Carcosa, to Yaddith and Y’ha-nthlei near Innsmouth, to Yoth and Yuggoth, and from far off I have looked upon Zothique, from the eye of Algol. When Fomalhaut has topped the trees, call forth to Cthugha in these words, thrice repeated: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Fomalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! Iä! Cthugha! When He has come, go swiftly, lest you, too, be destroyed. For it is fitting that this accursed spot be blasted so that Nyarlathotep comes no more out of interstellar space. Do you hear me, Dorgan? Do you hear me? Dorgan! Laird Dorgan!”

  There was a sudden sound of sharp protest, followed by a scuffling and tearing noise, as if Gardner had been forcibly removed, and then silence, utter and complete!

  For a few moments longer Laird let the record run, but there was nothing more, and finally he started it over, saying tensely, “I think we’d better copy that as best we can. You take every other speech, and let’s both copy that formula from Gardner.”

  “Was it …?”

  “I’d know his voice anywhere,” he said shortly.

  “He’s alive then?”

  He looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “We don’t know that.”

  “But his voice!”

  He shook his head, for the sounds were coming forth once more, and both of us had to bend to the task of copying, which was easier than it promised to be, for the spaces between speeches were great enough to enable us to copy without undue haste. The language of the chants and the words to Cthugha enunciated by Gardner’s voice offered extreme difficulty, but by means of repeated playings, we managed to put down the approximate equivalent of the sounds. When finally we had finished, Laird shut the dictaphone off and looked at me with quizzical and troubled eyes, grave with concern and uncertainty. I said nothing; what we had just heard, added to everything that had gone before, left us no alternative. There was room for doubt about legends, beliefs, and the like—but the infallible record of the dictaphone was conclusive even if it did no more than verify half-heard credos—for it was true, there was still nothing definite; it was as if the whole were so completely beyond the comprehension of man that only in the oblique suggestion of its individual parts could something like understanding be achieved, as if the entirety were too unspeakably soul-searing for the mind of man to withstand.

  “Fomalhaut rises almost at sunset—a little before, I think,” mused Laird—clearly, like myself, he had accepted what we had heard without challenge other than the mystery surrounding its meaning. “It should be above the trees—presumably twenty to thirty degrees above the horizon, because it doesn’t pass near enough to the zenith in this latitude to appear above these pines—at approximately an hour after darkness falls. Say nine-thirty or so.”

  “You aren’t thinking of trying it tonight?” I asked. “After all—what does it mean? Who or what is Cthugha?”

  “I don’t know any more than you. And I’m not trying it tonight. You’ve forgotten the slab. Are you still game to go out there—after this?”

  I nodded. I did not trust myself to speak, but I was not consumed by any eagerness whatever to dare the darkness that lingered like a living entity within the forest surrounding Rick’s Lake.

  Laird looked at his watch, and then at me, his eyes burning now with a kind of feverish determination, as if he were forcing himself to take this final step to face the unknown being whose manifestations had made the woods its own. If he expected me to hesitate, he was disappointed; however beset by f
ear I might be, I would not show it. I got up and went out of the lodge at his side.

  IV

  There are aspects of hidden life, exterior as well as of the depths of the mind, that are better kept secret and away from the awareness of common man; for there lurk in dark places of the earth horrible revenants belonging to a stratum of the subconscious which is mercifully beyond the apprehension of common man—indeed, there are aspects of creation so grotesquely shuddersome that the very sight of them would blast the sanity of the beholder. Fortunately, it is not possible even to bring back in anything but suggestion what we saw on the slab in the forest at Rick’s Lake that night in October, for the thing was so unbelievable, transcending all known laws of science, that adequate words for its description have no existence in the language.

  We arrived at the belt of trees around the slab while afterglow yet lingered in the western heavens, and by the illumination of a flashlight Laird carried, we examined the face of the slab itself, and the carving on it: of a vast, amorphous creature, drawn by an artist who evidently lacked sufficient imagination to etch the creature’s face, for it had none, bearing only a curious, cone-like head which even in stone seemed to have a fluidity which was unnerving; moreover, the creature was depicted as having both tentacle-like appendages and hands—or growths similar to hands, not only two, but several; so that it seemed both human and non-human in its structure. Beside it had been carved two squat squid-like figures from a part of which—presumably the heads, though no outline was definitive—projected what must certainly have been instruments of some kind, for the strange, repugnant attendants appeared to be playing them.

  Our examination was necessarily hurried, for we did not want to risk being seen here by whatever might come, and it may be that in the circumstances, imagination got the better of us. But I do not think so. It is difficult to maintain that consistently, sitting here at my desk, removed in space and time from what happened there; but I do maintain it. Despite the quickened awareness and irrational fear of the unknown which obsessed both of us, we kept a determined open-mindedness about every aspect of the problem we had chosen to solve. If anything, I have erred in this account on the side of science over that of imagination. In the plain light of reason, the carvings on that stone slab were not only obscene, but bestial and frightening beyond measure, particularly in the light of what Partier had hinted, and what Gardner’s notes and the material from Miskatonic University had vaguely outlined, and even if time had permitted, it is doubtful if we could have looked long upon them.

  We retreated to a spot comparatively near the way we must take to return to the lodge, and yet not too far from the open place where the slab lay, so that we might see clearly and still remain hidden in a place easy of access to the return path. There we took our stand and waited in that chilling hush of an October evening, while stygian darkness encompassed us, and only one or two stars twinkled high overhead, miraculously visible among the towering treetops.

  According to Laird’s watch, we waited exactly an hour and ten minutes before the sound as of wind began, and at once there was a manifestation which had about it all the trappings of the supernatural; for no sooner had the rushing sound begun, than the slab we had so quickly quitted began to glow—at first so indistinguishably that it seemed an illusion, and then with a phosphorescence of increasing brilliance, until it gave off such a glow that it was as if a pillar of light extended upward into the heavens. This was the second curious circumstance—the light followed the outlines of the slab, and flowed upward; it was not diffused and dispersed around the glade and into the woods, but shone heavenward with the insistence of a directed beam. Simultaneously, the very air seemed charged with evil; all around us lay thickly such an aura of fearsomeness that it rapidly became impossible to remain free of it. It was apparent that by some means unknown to us the rushing sound as of wind which now filled the air was not only associated with the broad beam of light flowing upward, but was caused by it; moreover, as we watched, the intensity and color of the light varied constantly, changing from a blinding white to a lambent green, from green to a kind of lavender; occasionally it was so intensely brilliant that it was necessary to avert our eyes, but for the most part it could be looked at without hurt to our eyes.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the rushing sound stopped, the light became diffuse and dim; and almost immediately the weird piping as of flutes smote upon our ears. It came not from around us, but from above, and with one accord, both of us turned to look as far into heaven as the now fading light would permit.

  Just what took place then before our eyes I cannot explain. Was it actually something that came hurtling down, streaming down, rather?—for the masses were shapeless—or was it the product of imagination that proved singularly uniform when later Laird and I found opportunity to compare notes? The illusion of great black things streaking down in the path of that light was so great that we glanced back at the slab.

  What we saw there sent us screaming voicelessly from that hellish spot.

  For, where but a moment before there had been nothing, there was now a gigantic protoplasmic mass, a colossal being who towered upward toward the stars, and whose actual physical being was in constant flux; and flanking it on either side were two lesser beings, equally amorphous, holding pipes or flutes in appendages and making that demoniac music which echoed and reechoed in the enclosing forest. But the thing on the slab, the Dweller in Darkness, was the ultimate in horror; for from its mass of amorphous flesh there grew at will before our eyes tentacles, claws, hands, and withdrew again; the mass itself diminished and swelled effortlessly, and where its head was and its features should have been there was only a blank facelessness all the more horrible because even as we looked there rose from its blind mass a low ululation in that half-bestial, half-human voice so familiar to us from the record made in the night!

  We fled, I say, so shaken that it was only by a supreme effort of will that we were able to take flight in the right direction. And behind us the voice rose, the blasphemous voice of Nyarlathotep, the Blind, Faceless One, the Mighty Messenger, even while there rang in the channels of memory the frightened words of the half-breed, Old Peter—It was a Thing—didn’t have no face, hollered there till I thought my eardrums ’d bust, and them things that was with it—Gawd!—echoed there while the voice of that Being from outermost space shrieked and gibbered to the hellish music of the hideous attending flute-players, rising to ululate through the forest and leave its mark forever in memory!

  Y’gnaiih! Ygnaiih! EEE-yayayayayaaa-haaahaaahaaahaaa-ngh’aaa-ngh’aaa-ya-va-yaaa!

  Then all was still.

  And yet, incredible as it may seem, the ultimate horror awaited us.

  For we had gone but halfway to the lodge when we were simultaneously aware of something following; behind us rose a hideous, horribly suggestive sloshing sound, as if the amorphous entity had left the slab which in some remote time must have been erected by its worshippers, and was pursuing us. Obsessed by abysmal fright, we ran as neither of us has ever run before, and we were almost upon the lodge before we were aware that the sloshing sound, the trembling and shuddering of the earth—as if some gigantic being walked upon it—had ceased, and in their stead came only the calm, unhurried tread of footsteps.

  But the footsteps were not our own! And in the aura of unreality, the fearsome outsideness in which we walked and breathed, the suggestiveness of those footsteps was almost maddening!

  We reached the lodge, lit a lamp, and sank into chairs to await whatever it was that was coming so steadily, unhurriedly on, mounting the verandah steps, putting its hand on the knob of the door, swinging the door open.…

  It was Professor Gardner who stood there!

  Then Laird sprang up, crying, “Professor Gardner!”

  The professor smiled reservedly and put one hand up to shade his eyes. “If you don’t mind, I’d like the light dimmed. I’ve been in the dark so long.…”

  Laird turned to do his
bidding without question, and he came forward into the room, walking with the ease and poise of a man who is as sure of himself as if he had never vanished from the face of the earth more than three months before, as if he had not made a frantic appeal to us during the night just past, as if.…

  I glanced at Laird; his hand was still at the lamp, but his fingers were no longer turning down the wick, simply holding to it, while he gazed down unseeing. I looked over at Professor Gardner; he sat with his head turned from the lights, his eyes closed, a little smile playing about his lips; at that moment he looked precisely as I had often seen him look at the University Club in Madison, and it was as if everything that had taken place here at the lodge were but an evil dream.

  But it was not a dream!

  “You were gone last night?” asked the professor.

  “Yes. But, of course, we had the dictaphone.”

  “Ah. You heard something then?”

  “Would you like to hear the record, sir?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  Laird went over and put it on the machine to play it again, and we sat in silence, listening to everything upon it, no one saying anything until it had been completed. Then the professor slowly turned his head.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it, sir,” answered Laird. “The speeches are too disjointed—except for yours. There seems to be some coherence there.”

  Suddenly, without warning, the room was surcharged with menace; it was but a momentary impression, but Laird felt it as keenly as I did, for he started noticeably. He was taking the record from the machine when the professor spoke again.

  “It doesn’t occur to you that you may be the victim of a hoax?”

  “No.”

  “And if I told you that I had found it possible to make every sound that was registered on that record?”

  Laird looked at him for a full minute before replying in a low voice that, of course, Professor Gardner had been investigating the phenomena of Rick’s Lake woods for a far longer time than we had, and if he said so.…