Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  A harsh laugh escaped the professor. “Entirely natural phenomena, my boy! There’s a mineral deposit under that grotesque slab in the woods; it gives off light and also a miasma that is productive of hallucinations. It’s as simple as that. As for the various disappearances—sheer folly, human failing, nothing more, but with the air of coincidence. I came here with high hopes of verifying some of the nonsense to which old Partier lent himself long ago—but—” He smiled disdainfully, shook his head, and extended his hand. “Let me have the record, Laird.”

  Without question, Laird gave Professor Gardner the record. The older man took it and was bringing it up before his eyes when he jogged his elbow and, with a sharp cry of pain, dropped it. It broke into dozens of pieces on the floor of the lodge.

  “Oh!” cried the professor. “I’m sorry.” He turned his eyes on Laird. “But then—since I can duplicate it any time for you from what I’ve learned about the lore of this place, by way of Partier’s mouthings—” He shrugged.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Laird quietly.

  “Do you mean to say that everything on that record was just your imagination, Professor?” I broke in. “Even that chant for the summoning of Cthugha?”

  The older man’s eyes turned on me; his smile was sardonic. “Cthugha? What do you suppose he or that is but the figment of someone’s imagination? And the inference—my dear boy, use your head. You have before you the clear inference that Cthugha has his abode on Fomalhaut, which is twenty-seven light-years away, and that, if this chant is thrice repeated when Fomalhaut has risen Cthugha will appear to somehow render this place no longer habitable by man or outside entity. How do you suppose that could be accomplished?”

  “Why, by something akin to thought-transference,” replied Laird doggedly. “It’s not unreasonable to suppose that if we were to direct thoughts toward Fomalhaut that something there might receive them—granting that there might be life there. Thought is instant. And that they in turn may be so highly developed that dematerialization and rematerialization might be as swift as thought.”

  “My boy—are you serious?” The older man’s voice revealed his contempt.

  “You asked.”

  “Well, then, as the hypothetic answer to a theoretical problem, I can overlook that.”

  “Frankly,” I said again, disregarding a curious negative shaking of Laird’s head, “I don’t think that what we saw in the forest tonight was just hallucination—caused by a miasma rising out of the earth or otherwise.”

  The effect of this statement was extraordinary. Visibly, the professor made every effort to control himself; his reactions were precisely those of a savant challenged by a cretin in one of his classes. After a few moments he controlled himself and said only, “You’ve been there then. I suppose it’s too late to make you believe otherwise.…”

  “I’ve always been open to conviction, sir, and I lean to the scientific method,” said Laird.

  Professor Gardner put his hand over his eyes and said, “I’m tired. I noticed last night when I was here that you’re in my old room, Laird—so I’ll take the room next to you, opposite Jack’s.”

  He went up the stairs as if nothing had happened between the last time he had occupied the lodge and this.

  V

  The rest of the story—and the culmination of that apocalyptic night—are soon told.

  I could not have been asleep for more than an hour—the time was one in the morning—when I was awakened by Laird. He stood beside my bed fully dressed and in a tense voice ordered me to get up and dress, to pack whatever essentials I had brought, and be ready for anything. Nor would he permit me to put on a light to do so, though he carried a small pocket-flash, and used it sparingly. To all my questions, he cautioned me to wait.

  When I had finished, he led the way out of the room with a whispered, “Come.”

  He went directly to the room into which Professor Gardner had disappeared. By the light of his flash, it was evident that the bed had not been touched; moreover, in the faint film of dust that lay on the floor, it was clear that Professor Gardner had walked into the room, over to a chair beside the window, and out again.

  “Never touched the bed, you see,” whispered Laird.

  “But why?”

  Laird gripped my arm, hard. “Do you remember what Partier hinted—what we saw in the woods—the protoplasmic, amorphousness of the thing? And what the record said?”

  “But Gardner told us—” I protested.

  Without a further word, he turned. I followed him downstairs, where he paused at the table where we had worked and flashed the light upon it. I was surprised into making a startled exclamation which Laird hushed instantly. For the table was bare of everything but the copy of The Outsider and Others and three copies of Weird Tales, a magazine containing stories supplementing those in the book by the eccentric Providence genius, Lovecraft. All Gardner’s notes, all our own notations, the photostats from Miskatonic University—everything gone!

  “He took them,” said Laird. “No one else could have done so.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Back to the place from which he came.” He turned on me, his eyes gleaming in the reflected glow of the flashlight. “Do you understand what that means, Jack?”

  I shook my head.

  “They know we’ve been there, they know we’ve seen and learned too much.…”

  “But how?”

  “You told them.”

  “I? Good God, man, are you mad? How could I have told them?”

  “Here, in this lodge, tonight—you yourself gave the show away, and I hate to think of what might happen now. We’ve got to get away.”

  For one moment all the events of the past few days seemed to fuse into an unintelligible mass; Laird’s urgence was unmistakable, and yet the thing he suggested was so utterly unbelievable that its contemplation even for so fleeting a moment threw my thoughts into the extremest confusion.

  Laird was talking now, quickly. “Don’t you think it odd—how he came back? How he came out of the woods after the hellish thing we saw there—not before? And the questions he asked—the drift of those questions. And how he managed to break the record—our one scientific proof of something? And now, the disappearance of all the notes—of everything that might point to substantiation of what he called ‘Partier’s nonsense’?”

  “But if we are to believe what he told us.…”

  He broke in before I could finish. “One of them was right. Either the voice on the record calling to me—or the man who was here tonight.”

  “The man …”

  But whatever I wanted to say was stilled by Laird’s harsh, “Listen!”

  From outside, from the depths of the horror-haunted dark, the earth-haven of the Dweller in Darkness, came once more, for the second time that night, the weirdly beautiful, yet cacophonous strains of flute-like music, rising and falling, accompanied by a kind of chanted ululation, and by the sound as of great wings flapping.

  “Yes, I hear,” I whispered.

  “Listen closely!”

  Even as he spoke, I understood. There was something more—the sounds from the forest were not only rising and falling—they were approaching!

  “Now do you believe me?” demanded Laird. “They’re coming for us!” He turned on me. “The chant!”

  “What chant?” I fumbled stupidly.

  “The Cthugha chant—do you remember it?”

  “I took it down. I’ve got it here.”

  For an instant I was afraid that this, too, might have been taken from us, but it was not; it was in my pocket where I had left it. With shaking hands, Laird tore the paper from my grasp.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Fomalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! Iä! Cthugha!” he said, running to the verandah, myself at his heels.

  Out of the woods came the bestial voice of the dweller in the dark. “Ee-ya-ya-haa-haahaaa! Ygnaiih! Ygnaiih!”

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Fomalha
ut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! Iä! Cthugha!” repeated Laird for the second time.

  Still the ghastly melee of sounds from the woods came on, in no way diminished, rising now to supreme heights of terror-fraught fury, with the bestial voice of the thing from the slab added to the wild, mad music of the pipes, and the sound as of wings.

  And then, once more, Laird repeated the primal words of the chant.

  On the instant that the final guttural sound had left his lips, there began a sequence of events no human eye was ever destined to witness. For suddenly the darkness was gone, giving way to a fearsome amber glow; simultaneously the flute-like music ceased, and in its place rose cries of rage and terror. Then, there appeared thousands of tiny points of light—not only on and among the trees, but on the earth itself, on the lodge and the car standing before it. For still a further moment we were rooted to the spot, and then it was borne in upon us that the myriad points of light were living entities of flame! For wherever they touched, fire sprang up, seeing which, Laird rushed into the lodge for such of our things as he could carry forth before the holocaust made it impossible for us to escape Rick’s Lake.

  He came running out—our bags had been downstairs—gasping that it was too late to take the dictaphone or anything else, and together we dashed toward the car, shielding our eyes a little from the blinding light all around. But even though we had shielded our eyes, it was impossible not to see the great amorphous shapes streaming skyward from this accursed place, nor the equally great being hovering like a cloud of living fire above the trees. So much we saw, before the frightful struggle to escape the burning woods forced us to forget mercifully the other details of that terrible, maddened flight.

  Horrible as were the things that took place in the darkness of the forest at Rick’s Lake, there was something more cataclysmic still, something so blasphemously conclusive that even now I shudder and tremble uncontrollably to think of it. For in that brief dash to the car, I saw something that explained Laird’s doubt, I saw what had made him take heed of the voice on the record and not of the thing that came to us as Professor Gardner. The keys were there before, but I did not understand; even Laird had not fully believed. Yet it was given to us—we did not know. “It is not desired by the Old Ones that mere man shall know too much,” Partier had said. And that terrible voice on the record had hinted even more clearly: Go forth in his form or in whatever form chosen in the guise of man, and destroy that which may lead them to us.… Destroy that which may lead them to us! Our record, the notes, the photostats from Miskatonic University, yes, and even Laird and myself! And the thing had gone forth, for it was Nyarlathotep, the Mighty Messenger, the Dweller in Darkness who had gone forth and who had returned into the forest to send his minions back to us. It was he who had come from interstellar space even as Cthugha, the fire being, had come from Fomalhaut upon the utterance of the command that woke him from his eon-long sleep under that amber star, the command that Gardner, the living-dead captive of the terrible Nyarlathotep, had discovered in those fantastic travelings in space and time; and it was he who returned whence he had come, with his earth-haven now forever rendered useless for him with its destruction by the minions of Cthugha!

  I know, and Laird knows. We never speak of it.

  If we had had any doubt, despite everything that had gone before, we could not forget that final, soul-searing discovery, the thing we saw when we shielded our eyes from the flames all around and looked away from those beings in the heavens, the line of footprints that led away from the lodge in the direction of that hellish slab deep in the black forest, the footprints that began in the soft soil beyond the verandah in the shape of a man’s footprints, and changed with each step into a hideously suggestive imprint made by a creature of incredible shape and weight, with variations of outline and size so grotesque as to have been incomprehensible to anyone who had not seen the thing on the slab—and beside them, torn and rent as if by an expanding force, the clothing that once belonged to Professor Gardner, left piece by piece along the trail back into the woods, the trail taken by the hellish monstrosity that had come out of the night, the Dweller in Darkness who had visited us in the shape and guise of Professor Gardner!

  * Originally published in Weird Tales, November 1944.

  Beyond the Threshold*

  AUGUST DERLETH

  I

  The story is really my grandfather’s.

  In a manner of speaking, however, it belongs to the entire family, and beyond them, to the world; and there is no longer any reason for suppressing the singularly terrible details of what happened in that lonely house deep in the forest places of northern Wisconsin.

  The roots of the story go back into the mists of early time, far beyond the beginnings of the Alwyn family line, but of this I knew nothing at the time of my visit to Wisconsin in response to my cousin’s letter about our grandfather’s strange decline in health. Josiah Alwyn had always seemed somehow immortal to me even as a child, and he had not appeared to change throughout the years between: a barrel-chested old man, with a heavy, full face, decorated with a closely clipped moustache and a small beard to soften the hard line of his square jaw. His eyes were dark, not overlarge, and his brows were shaggy; he wore his hair long, so that his head had a leonine appearance. Though I saw little of him when I was very young, still he left an indelible impression on me in the brief visits he paid when he stopped at the ancestral country home near Arkham, in Massachusetts—those short calls he made on his way to and from remote corners of the world: Tibet, Mongolia, the Arctic regions, and certain little-known islands in the Pacific.

  I had not seen him for years when the letter came from my cousin Frolin, who lived with him in the old house grandfather owned in the heart of the forest and lake country of northern Wisconsin. “I wish you could uproot yourself from Massachusetts long enough to come out here. A great deal of water has passed under various bridges, and the wind has blown about many changes since last you were here. Frankly, I think it most urgent that you come. In present circumstances, I don’t know to whom to turn, grandfather being not himself, and I need someone who can be trusted.” There was nothing obviously urgent about the letter, and yet there was a queer constraint, there was something between lines that stood out invisibly, intangibly, to make possible only one answer to Frolin’s letter—something in his phrase about the wind, something in the way he had written grandfather being not himself, something in the need he had expressed for someone who can be trusted.

  I could easily take a leave of absence from my position as assistant librarian at Miskatonic University in Arkham and go west that September; so I went. I went, harassed by an almost uncanny conviction that the need for haste was great: from Boston by plane to Chicago, and from there by train to the village of Harmon, deep in the forest country of Wisconsin—a place of great natural beauty, not far from the shores of Lake Superior, so that it was possible on days of wind and weather to hear the water’s sound.

  Frolin met me at the station. My cousin was in his late thirties then, but he had the look of someone ten years younger, with hot, intense brown eyes, and a soft, sensitive mouth that belied his inner hardness. He was singularly sober, though he had always alternated between gravity and a kind of infectious wildness—“the Irish in him,” as grandfather had once said. I met his eyes when I shook his hand, probing for some clue to his withheld distress, but I saw only that he was indeed troubled, for his eyes betrayed him, even as the roiled waters of a pond reveal disturbance below, though the surface may be as glass.

  “What is it?” I asked, when I sat at his side in the coupe, riding into the country of the tall pines. “Is the old man abed?”

  He shook his head. “Oh, no, nothing like that, Tony.” He shot me a queer, restrained glance. “You’ll see. You wait and see.”

  “What is it then?” I pressed him. “Your letter had the damndest sound.”

  “I hoped it would,” he said gravely.

  “And yet there was not
hing I could put my finger on,” I admitted. “But it was there, nevertheless.”

  He smiled. “Yes, I knew you’d understand. I tell you, it’s been difficult—extremely difficult. I thought of you a good many times before I sat down and wrote that letter, believe me!”

  “But if he’s not ill …? I thought you said he wasn’t himself.”

  “Yes, yes, so I did. You wait now, Tony; don’t be so impatient; you’ll see for yourself. It’s his mind, I think.”

  “His mind!” I felt a distinct wave of regret and shock at the suggestion that grandfather’s mind had given way; the thought that that magnificent brain had retreated from sanity was intolerable, and I was loath to entertain it. “Surely not!” I cried. “Frolin—what the devil is it?”

  He turned his troubled eyes on me once more. “I don’t know. But I think it’s something terrible. If it were only grandfather. But there’s the music—and then there are all the other things: the sounds and smells and—” He caught my amazed stare and turned away, almost with physical effort pausing in his talk. “But I’m forgetting. Don’t ask me anything more. Just wait. You’ll see for yourself.” He laughed shortly, a forced laugh. “Perhaps it’s not the old man who’s losing his mind. I’ve thought of that sometimes, too—with reason.”

  I said nothing more, but there was beginning to mushroom up inside me now a kind of tense fear, and for some time I sat by his side, thinking only of Frolin and old Josiah Alwyn living together in that old house, unaware of the towering pines all around, and the wind’s sound, and the fragrant pungence of leaf-fire smoke riding the wind out of the northwest. Evening came early to this country, caught in the dark pines, and, though afterglow still lingered in the west, fanning upward in a great wave of saffron and amethyst, darkness already possessed the forest through which we rode. Out of the darkness came the cries of the great horned owls and their lesser cousins, the screech owls, making an eerie magic in the stillness broken otherwise only by the wind’s voice and the noise of the car passing along the comparatively little-used road to the Alwyn house.