Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  And now will you allow me to pass on to another and very different matter, which is nonetheless peripherally related to your poetic work? Miskatonic is currently engaged in a broad interdepartmental research in the general area of folklore, language, and dreams, an investigation of the vocabulary of the collective unconscious, particularly as it expresses itself in poetry. The three scholars I have alluded to are among those active in this work, along with persons in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, who are carrying on the pioneering work of the late Professor George Gammell Angell, and from time to time I am honored to render them assistance. They have empowered me to ask you for your own help in this matter, which could be of signal importance. It is a matter of answering a few questions only, relating to the accidents of your writing and in no way impinging on its essence, and should not cut seriously into your time. Naturally any information you choose to supply will be treated as strictly confidential.

  I call your attention to the following two lines in “The Green Deeps”:

  Intelligence doth grow itself within

  The coral-palled, squat towers of Rulay.

  Did you in composing this poem ever consider a more eccentric spelling of the last (and presumably invented?) word? “R’lyeh,” say. And going back three lines, did you consider spelling “Nath” (invented?) with an initial “p”—i.e., “Pnath”?

  Also in the same poem:

  The rampant dragon dreams in far Cathay

  While snake-limbed Cutlu sleeps in deep Rulay.

  The name “Cutlu” (once more, invented?) is of considerable interest to us. Did you have phonetic difficulty in choosing the letters to represent the sound you had in mind? Did you perhaps simplify in the interests of poetic clarity? At any time did “Cthulhu” ever occur to you?

  (As you can see, we are discovering that the language of the collective unconscious is almost unpleasantly guttural and sibilant! All hawking and spitting, like German.)

  Also, there is this quatrain in your impressive lyric, “Sea Tombs”:

  Their spires underlie our deepest graves;

  Lit are they by a light that man has seen.

  Only the wingless worm can go between

  Our daylight and their vault beneath the waves.

  Were there some proofreading errors here?—or the equivalent. Specifically, in the second line should “that” be “no”? (And was the light you had in mind what you might call orange-blue or purple-green, or both?) And, in the next line, how does “winged” rather than “wingless” strike you?

  Finally, in regard to “Sea Tombs” and also the title poem of your book, Professor Peaslee has a question which he calls a “long shot” about the subterranean and submarine tunnels which you evoke. Did you ever have fantasies of such tunnels really existing in the area where you composed the poem?—the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, presumably, the Pacific Ocean being nearby. Did you perhaps try actually to trace the paths overlying these fancied tunnels? And did you happen to notice (excuse the strangeness of this question) an unusual number of venomous serpents along such routes?—rattlers, I would presume (in our area it would be copperheads, and in the South water moccasins and coral snakes). If so, do take care!

  If such tunnels should by some strange coincidence actually exist, it would be scientifically possible to confirm the fact without any digging or drilling (or by discovering an existent opening), it may interest you to know. Even vacuity—i.e., nothing—leaves its traces, it appears! Two Miskatonic science professors, who are part of the interdepartmental program I mentioned, have devised a highly portable apparatus for the purpose, which they call a magneto-optic geo-scanner. (That last hybrid word must sound a most clumsy and barbarous coinage to a poet, I’m sure, but you know scientists!) It is strange, is it not, to think of an investigation of dreams having geological repercussions? The clever though infelicitously named instrument is a simplified adaptation of one which has already discovered two new elements.

  I shall be making a trip west early next year, to confer with a man in San Diego who happens to be the son of the scholarly recluse whose researches led to our interdepartmental program—Henry Wentworth Akeley. (The local poet—alas, deceased—to whom you pay such generous tribute, was another such pioneer, it happens oddly.) I shall be driving my own British sports car, a diminutive Austin. I am something of an automobile maniac, I must confess, even a speed demon!—however inappropriate that may be for an assistant English professor. I would be very pleased to make your further acquaintance at that time, if entirely agreeable to you. I might even bring along a geo-scanner and we could check out those hypothetical tunnels!

  But I perhaps anticipate and presume too far. Pardon me. I will be very grateful for any attention you are able to give this letter and its necessarily impertinent questions.

  Once more, congratulations on The Tunneler!

  Yrs. very truly,

  Albert N. Wilmarth.

  It is quite impossible to describe all at once my state of mind when I finished reading this letter. I can only do so by stages. To begin with, I was flattered and gratified, even acutely embarrassed, by his apparently sincere praise of my verses—as what young poet wouldn’t be? And that a psychologist and an old librarian (even an anatomist!) should admire them too—it was almost too much.

  As soon as the man mentioned freshman English I realized that I had a vivid memory of him. Although I’d forgotten his name in the course of years, it came back to me like a shot when I glanced ahead at the end of the letter and saw it. He had been only an instructor then, a tall young man, cadaverously thin, always moving about with nervous rapidity, his shoulders hunched. He’d had a long jaw and a pale complexion, with dark-circled eyes which gave him a haunted look, as if he were constantly under some great strain to which he never alluded. He had the habit of jerking out a little notebook and making jottings without ceasing for a moment to discourse fluently, even brilliantly. He’d seemed incredibly well read and had had a lot to do with stimulating and deepening my interest in poetry. I even remembered his car—the other students used to joke about it with an undercurrent of envy. It had been a Model T Ford then, which he’d always driven at a brisk clip around the fringes of the Miskatonic campus, taking turns very sharply.

  The program of interdepartmental research he described sounded very impressive, even exciting, but eminently plausible—I was just discovering Jung then and also semantics. And to be invited so graciously to take part in it—once again I was flattered. If I hadn’t been alone while I read it, I might have blushed.

  One notion I got then did stop me briefly and for a moment almost turned me angrily against the whole thing—the sudden suspicion that the purpose of the program might not be the avowed one, that (the presence in it of a psychologist and a medical doctor influenced me in this) it was some sort of investigation of the delusions of crankish, imaginative people—not so much the incidental insights as the psychopathology of poets.

  But he was so very gracious and reasonable—no, I was being paranoid, I told myself. Besides, as soon as I got a ways into his detailed questions it was an altogether different reaction that filled me—one of utter amazement … and fear.

  For starters, he was so incredibly accurate in his guesses (for what else could they possibly be? I asked myself uneasily) about those invented names, that he had me gasping. I had first thought of spelling them “R’lyeh” and “Pnath”—exactly those letters, though of course memory can be tricky about such things.

  And then that Cthulhu—seeing it spelled that way actually made me shiver, it so precisely conveyed the deep-pitched, harsh, inhuman cry or chant I’d imagined coming up from profound black abysses, and only finally rendered as “Cutlu” rather dubiously, but fearing anything more complex would seem affectation. (And, really, you can’t fit the inner rhythms of a sound like “Cthulhu” into English poetry.)

  And then to find that he’d spotted those two proofreader’s errors, for they’d been
just that. The first I’d missed. The second (“wingless” for “winged”) I’d caught, but then rather spinelessly let stand, feeling all of a sudden that I’d perpetuated something overly fantastic when I’d put a figure from my life’s one nightmare (a worm with wings) into a poem.

  And topping even that, how in the name of all that’s wonderful could he have described unearthly colors I’d only dreamed of and never put into my poems at all? Using exactly the same color-words I’d used! I began to think that Miskatonic’s interdepartmental research project must have made some epochal discoveries about dreams and dreaming and the human imagination in general, enough to turn their scholars into wizards and dumbfound Adler, Freud, and even Jung.

  At that point in my reading of the letter I thought he’d hit me with everything he possibly could, but the next section managed to mine a still deeper source of horror and one most disturbingly close to everyday reality. That he should know, somehow deduce, all about my paths in the hills and my odd daydreams about them and about tunnels I’d fancied underlying them—that was truly staggering. And that he should ask and even warn me about venomous snakes, so that the very letter my mother was carrying unopened when she got her death sting contained a vital reference to it—really, for a moment and more then, I did wonder if I were going insane.

  And finally when despite all his jaunty “fancied’s” and “long shot’s” and “hypothetical’s” and English-professor witticisms, he began to talk as if he assumed my imaginary tunnels were real and to refer lightly to a scientific instrument that would prove it … well, by the time I’d finished his letter, I fully expected him to turn up the next minute—turn in sharply at our drive with a flourish of wheels and brakes in his Model T (no, Austin) and draw up in a cloud of dust at our door, the geo-scanner sitting on the front seat beside him like a fat black telescope directed downward!

  And yet he’d been so damnably breezy about it all! I simply didn’t know what to think.

  (I’ve been down in the basement again, checking things out. This writing stirs me up and makes me frightfully restless. I went out front, and there was a rattlesnake crossing the path in the hot slanting sunlight from the west. More evidence, if any were needed, that what I fear is true. Or do I hope for it? At all events, I killed the brute. The voices vibrate with, “The half-born worlds, the alien orbs, the stirrings in blackness, the hooded forms, the nighted depths, the shimmering vortices, the purple haze …”)

  When I’d calmed down somewhat next day, I wrote Wilmarth a long letter, confirming all his hints, confessing my utter astonishment at them, and begging him to explain how he’d made them. I volunteered to assist the interdepartmental project in any way I could and invited him to be my guest when he came west. I gave him a brief history of my life and my sleep anomalies, mentioning my mother’s death. I had a strange feeling of unreality as I posted the letter and waited with mixed feelings of impatience and lingering (and also regathering) incredulity for his reply.

  When it came, quite a fat one, it rekindled all my first excitement, though without satisfying all my curiosity by any means. Wilmarth was still inclined to write off his and his colleagues’ deductions about my word choices, dreams, and fantasies as lucky guesses, though he told me enough about the project to keep my curiosity in a fever—especially about its discoveries of obscure linkages between the life of the imagination and archaeological discoveries in far-off places. He seemed particularly interested in the fact that I generally never dreamed and that I slept for very long hours. He overflowed with thanks for my cooperation and my invitation, promising to include me on his itinerary when he drove west. And he had a lot more questions for me.

  The next months were strange ones. I lived my normal life, if it can be called that, keeping up my reading and studies and library visits, even writing a little new poetry from time to time. I continued my hill-ramblings, though with a new wariness. Sometimes during them I’d stop and stare at the dry earth beneath my feet, as if expecting to trace the outlines of a trapdoor in it. And sometimes I’d be consumed by sudden, wildly passionate feelings of grief and guilt at the thought of my father locked down there and at my mother’s horrible death too; I’d feel I must somehow go to them at all costs.

  And yet at the same time I was living only for Wilmarth’s letters and the moods of wonder, fantastic speculation, and panic—yet almost delicious terror—they evoked in me. He’d write about all sorts of things besides the project—my poetry and new readings and my ideas (he’d play the professorial mentor here from time to time), world events, the weather, astronomy, submarines, his pet cats, faculty politics at Miskatonic, town meetings at Arkham, his lectures, and the local trips he’d make. He made it all extremely interesting. Clearly he was an inveterate letter-writer and under his influence I became one too.

  But most of all, of course, I was fascinated by what he’d write from time to time about the project. He told me some very interesting things about the Miskatonic Antarctic expedition of 1930–31, with its five great Dornier airplanes, and last year’s somewhat abortive Australian one in which the psychologist Peaslee and his father, a onetime economist, had been involved. I remembered having read about them both in the newspapers, though the reports there had been curiously fragmentary and unsatisfying, almost as if the press were prejudiced against Miskatonic.

  I got the strong impression that Wilmarth would have liked very much to have accompanied both expeditions and was very much put out at not having been able (or allowed) to, though most of the time bravely concealing his disappointment. More than once he referred to his “unfortunate nervousness,” sensitivity to cold, fierce migraine attacks, and “bouts of ill health” which would put him to bed for a few days. And sometimes he’d speak with wistful admiration of the prodigious energy and stalwart constitutions of several of his colleagues, such as Professors Atwood and Pabodie, the geo-scanner’s inventors, Dr. Morgan, who was a big-game hunter, and even the octogenarian Armitage.

  There were occasional delays in his replies, which always filled me with anxiety and restlessness, sometimes because of these attacks of his and sometimes because he’d been away longer than he’d expected on some visit. One of the latter was to Providence to confer with colleagues and help investigate the death under mysterious circumstances involving a lightning bolt of Robert Blake, a poet like myself, short-story writer, and painter whose work had provided much material for the project.

  It was just after his visit to Providence that with a curious sort of guardedness and reluctance he mentioned visiting another colleague of sorts there (who was in poor health), a Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who had fictionalized (but quite sensationally, Wilmarth warned me) some Arkham scandals and some of Miskatonic’s researches and project activities. These stories had been published (when at all) in cheap pulp magazines, especially in a lurid journal called Weird Tales (you’ll want to tear the cover off, if ever you should dare to buy a copy, he assured me). I recalled having seen the magazine on downtown newsstands in Hollywood and Westwood. I hadn’t found the covers offensive. Most of their nude female figures, by some sentimental woman artist, were decorously sleek pastels and their activities only playfully perverse. Others, by one Senf, were a rather florid folk art quite reminiscent of my father’s floral chiselings.

  But after that, of course, I haunted secondhand bookstores, hunting down copies of Weird Tales (mostly) with Lovecraft stories in them, until I’d found a few and read them—one, “The Call of Cthulhu,” no less. It cost me the strangest shudders, let me tell you, to see that name again, spelled out in cheapest print, under such very outlandish circumstances. Truly, my sense of reality was set all askew and if the tale that Lovecraft told with a strange dignity and power was anything like the truth, then Cthulhu was real, an other-dimensional extraterrestrial monster dreaming in an insane, Pacific-sunken metropolis which sent out mental messages (and—who knows?—tunnels) to the world at large. In another tale, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Albert N. Wilmarth
was a leading character, and that Akeley too he’d mentioned.

  It was all fearfully unsettling and confounding. If I hadn’t attended Miskatonic myself and lived in Arkham, I’d have thought surely they were a writer’s projections.

  As you can imagine, I continued to haunt the dusty bookstores and I bombarded Wilmarth with frantic questions. His replies were of a most pacifying and temporizing sort. Yes, he’d been afraid of my getting too excited, but hadn’t been able to resist telling me about the stories. Lovecraft often laid on things very thickly indeed. I’d understand everything much better when we could really talk together and he could explain in person. Really, Lovecraft had an extremely powerful imagination and sometimes it got out of hand. No, Miskatonic had never tried to suppress the stories or take legal action, for fear of even less desirable publicity—and because the project members thought the stories might be a good preparation for the world if some of their more frightening hypotheses were verified. Really, Lovecraft was a very charming and well-intentioned person, but sometimes he went too far. And so on and so on.

  Really, I don’t think I could have contained myself except that, it now being 1937, Wilmarth sent me word that he was at last driving west. The Austin had been given a thorough overhaul and was “packed to the gills” with the geo-scanner, endless books and papers, and other instruments and materials, including a drug Morgan had just refined, “which induces dreaming and may, conceivably, he says, facilitate clairvoyance and clairaudience. It might make even you dream—should you consent to ingest an experimental dose.”

  While he was gone from 118 Saltonstall his rooms would be occupied and his cats, including his beloved Blackfellow, cared for by a close friend named Danforth, who’d spent the last five years in a mental hospital recovering from his ghastly Antarctic experience at the Mountains of Madness.