Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  I decided I had nothing to lose by frankness. “I’ve heard about you, Mr. Chickno. I’m most interested to meet you.”

  He said, “Ay. ’Appen you are.” He sipped thoughtfully at the second rum, and sucked at a hollow tooth. Then he said: “You look a sensible fellow. Why do you stay where you’re not wanted?”

  I didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

  “I’m leaving soon—probably at the end of the week. But I came here to try and find something. Have you heard of the Voynich manuscript?” He obviously hadn’t. So in spite of a feeling that I was wasting my breath—he was looking past me blankly—I told him briefly about the history of the manuscript, and how I had deciphered it. I ended by saying that Machen had also seemed to know the work, and that I suspected that its other half, or perhaps another copy, might be in this part of the world. When he answered, I saw that I had been mistaken to think him stupid or inattentive.

  “So you want me to believe you’re in this part lookin’ for a manuscript? Is that all?” he said.

  The tone had a Lancashire bluntness, but was not hostile. I said, “That’s the reason I came here.”

  He leaned across the table, and breathed rum on me. “Look ’ere, mister, I know a lot more than you think. I know everything about you. So let’s not ’ave any of this. You may be a college professor, but you don’t impress me.” I had a strong impression that I was looking at a rat or a weasel—a feeling that he was dangerous, and ought to be destroyed, like a dangerous snake—but I made an effort to keep this out of my eyes. I suddenly knew something else about him; he was impressed by the fact that I was a professor, and was enjoying his position of virtually giving me orders to go away and mind my own business.

  So I drew a deep breath and said politely, “Believe me, Mr. Chickno, my main interest is in that manuscript. If I could find that, I’d be perfectly happy.”

  He drained his rum, and for a moment I thought he was going to walk out. But he only wanted another. I went to the bar and got him a double, and another Haig for myself.

  When I sat down again, he took a good swallow of the rum. “I know why you’re ’ere, mister. I know about your book as well. I’m not a vindictive sort of bloke. All I’m saying is that nobody’s interested in you. So why don’t you go back to America? You won’t find the rest of your book round ’ere, I can tell you that.”

  Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. Then I decided to try complete frankness. “Why do they want me to go?”

  For a moment, he didn’t take in what I had said. Then his face became sober and serious—but only briefly. “Better not to talk of it.” But after a moment, he seemed to think better of his suggestion. His eyes were malicious again. He leaned forward to me. “They’re not interested in you, mister. They couldn’t care less about you. It’s ’im they don’t like.” His head jerked vaguely—I gather he meant Urquart. “He’s a fool. He’s had plenty of warning, and you can tell him from me, they won’t bother to warn him next time.”

  “He doesn’t think they have any power. Not enough to harm him,” I said.

  He seemed unable to make up his mind whether to smile or sneer. His face contorted, and for a moment, I had the illusion that his eyes had turned red, like a spider’s. Then he spat out: “Then he’s nothing but a bleeding——fool, and he deserves what he gets.”

  While I felt a twinge of fear, I also felt a touch of triumph. He had started to talk. My frankness had paid off. And unless he suddenly became cautious again, I was close to finding out some of the things I wanted to know.

  He controlled himself, then said, less violently, “First of all, he’s a fool because he doesn’t really know anything. Not a bloody thing.” He tapped my wrist with a bent forefinger.

  “I suspected that,” I said.

  “You did, did you? Well, you were right. All this stuff about Atlantis.” There was no doubt that scorn was real. But what he said next shocked me more than anything so far. He leaned forward, and said with an odd sincerity: “These things aren’t out of a fairy story, you know. They’re not playing games.”

  And I understood something that had not been clear to me so far. He knew “them,” knew them with the indifferent realism of a scientist referring to the atomic bomb. I think that, up to this point, I had not really believed in “them”; I had been hoping that it was all some odd delusion; or that, like ghosts, they could not impinge on human affairs to any practical extent. His words made me understand my mistake. “These things.” My hair stirred, and I felt the cold flowing down my legs to my feet.

  “What are they doing, then?”

  He emptied the glass, and said casually, “That’s nuthin’ to do wi’ you, mate. You can’t do anything about it. Nobody can.” He set down the glass. “You see, this is their world anyway. We’re a mistake. They want it back again.” He caught the eye of the barman, and pointed to his glass.

  I went over and collected another rum for him. Now I wanted to leave as soon as possible, to speak to Urquart. But it would be difficult, without running the risk of offending him.

  Chickno solved my problem. After his third double rum, he abruptly ceased to be intelligible. He muttered things in a language which I took to be Romany. He mentioned a “Liz Southern” several times, pronouncing it “Sowthern,” and it was only later that I recalled that this was the name of one of the Lancashire witches, executed in 1612. I never found out what he was saying, or whether he was, in fact, referring to the witch. His eyes became glassy, although he obviously thought he was still communicating something to me. Finally, I had the eerie impression that it was no longer old Chickno who was talking to me, but that he was possessed by some other creature. Half an hour later, he was dozing with his head on the table. I crossed to the barman.

  “I’m sorry about this.” I pointed to old Chickno.

  “That’s all right,” he said. I think he had gathered by then that I was not a friend of the gypsy’s. “I’ll phone his grandson. He’ll take him home.”

  I rang Urquart’s house from the nearest phone box. His housekeeper said he was asleep. I was tempted to go over and wake him, then decided against it, and went back to the hotel wishing I had someone to talk to.

  I tried to sort out my thoughts, to see some meaning in what Chickno had said. If he didn’t deny the reality of the Lloigor, then why was Urquart so wrong? But I had drunk too much, and I felt exhausted. I fell asleep at midnight, but slept badly, haunted by nightmares. At two in the morning, I woke up with a horrible sense of the evil reality of the Lloigor, although it was mixed up in my mind with my nightmares about the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper. My sense of danger was so strong that I switched on the light. This improved things. Then I decided that I had better write down my conversation with Chickno and give it to Urquart to read, in case he could add some of the missing parts to the jigsaw. I wrote it down in detail.

  My fingers numb with the cold, I slept again, but was awakened by a faint trembling of the room, which reminded me of an earthquake tremor I experienced once in Mexico. Then I slept again until morning.

  Before going in to breakfast, I enquired at the desk for mail. There was a reply to my letter from Lauerdale at Brown, and I read it as I ate my kippers.

  Much of the letter was literary—a discussion of Lovecraft and his psychology. But there were pages that held far more interest for me. Lauerdale wrote: “I myself am inclined to believe, on the evidence of letters, that one of the most important experiences in Lovecraft’s early life was a visit to Cohasset, a run-down fishing village between Quonochontaug and Weekapaug in Southern Rhode Island. Like Lovecraft’s ‘Innsmouth,’ this village was later to vanish from the maps. I have been there, and its description corresponds in many ways to Lovecraft’s description of Innsmouth—which Lovecraft placed in Massachusetts: ‘more empty houses than people,’ the air of decay, the stale fish smell. There was actually a character known as Captain Marsh living in Cohasset in 1915, when Lovecraft was there, who had spent some t
ime in the South Seas. It may have been he who told the young Lovecraft the stories of evil Polynesian temples and undersea people. The chief of these legends—as mentioned also by Jung and Spence—is of gods from the stars (or demons) who were once lords of this earth, who lost their power through the practise of evil magic, but who will one day return and take over the earth again. In the version quoted by Jung, these gods are said to have created human beings from subhuman monsters.

  “In my own opinion, Lovecraft derived the rest of the ‘mythos’ from Machen, perhaps from Poe, who occasionally hints at such things. ‘MS. Found in a Bottle,’ for example. I found no evidence that there were ever sinister rumours connected with the ‘shunned house’ in Benefit Street, or any other house in Providence. I shall be extremely interested to read what you have to say about Machen’s sources. While I think it is just possible that Machen heard some story about some ‘arcane’ volume of the sort you mention, I can find no evidence that Lovecraft had firsthand acquaintance with such a book. I am sure that any connection between his Necronomicon and the Voynich MS. is, as you suggest, coincidence.”

  My hair stirred as I read the sentence about gods “who will one day return and take over the earth again,” as also about the reference to Polynesian legends. For, as Churchward has written: “Easter Island, Tahiti, Samoas,… Hawaii, and the Marquesas are the pathetic fingers of that great land, standing today as sentinels of a silent grave.” Polynesia is the remains of Mu.

  All this told me little more than I knew already, or had guessed. But my encounter with Chickno raised a practical problem: how far was Urquart actually in danger? He might be right that the Lloigor had no power in themselves, or very little; but Chickno and his family were a different matter. Even taking the most sceptical view of all, that this whole thing was pure imagination and superstition, Chickno represented a very real danger. For some reason, they hated Urquart.

  The desk clerk touched my sleeve: “Telephone, sir.”

  It was Urquart. I said, “Thank heavens you rang. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “You’ve heard, then?”

  “Heard what?”

  “About the explosion? Chickno’s dead.”

  “What! Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. Although they can’t find much of him.”

  “I’ll be over right away.”

  That was the first I heard of the great Llandalffen explosion. I have on my desk a volume called Stranger than Logic by the late Frank Edwards, one of those slightly unreliable compilations of mysteries and wonders. It has a section headed “The Great Llandalffen Explosion,” and what he says, substantially, is that the explosion was atomic, and was probably due to a fault in the engines of an “unidentified flying object”; he quotes the rocket scientist Willey Ley to the effect that the Siberian crater of 1908 may have been an explosion of antimatter, and draws parallels between the Llandalffen explosion and the Podkamennaya Tunguska fall. This I flatly hold to be absurd. I saw the area of the explosion, and there was not nearly enough damage for an atomic explosion, even a small one.

  However, I am running ahead of my story. Urquart met me halfway to his house, and we drove out to Llandalffen. What had happened was simply that there had been a tremendous explosion at about four o’clock that morning; it may have been this that shook me awake in the early hours. The area is deserted, luckily, but a farm-labourer in a cottage three miles away was thrown out of bed by the explosion. The strangest feature of the whole affair is that it made so little actual noise; the farm-labourer thought it was an earth tremor, and went back to sleep. Two men in the village, returning home from a party, said they heard the explosion as a dull sound like distant thunder or blasting, and wondered whether a plane might have crashed with a load of bombs. The farm-labourer pedalled out to investigate at seven in the morning, but found nothing. However, he mentioned it to the farmer who employed him, and the two drove over in the farmer’s car a little after nine. This time, the farmer turned off down the side road, and drove towards the gypsy caravans, which were about two miles farther on. Their first find was not, as Mr. Edwards states, a part of a human body, but part of the foreleg of a donkey, which lay in the middle of the road. Beyond this, they discovered that stone walls and trees had been flattened. Bits of the caravan and other relics were scattered for hundreds of yards around the focus of the explosion, the two-acre field in which the caravans had stood.

  I saw the field myself—we were allowed to approach by the inspector of police from Llandalffen, who knew Urquart. My first impression was that it had been an earthquake rather than an ordinary explosion. An explosion produces a crater, or clears a more-or-less flattened area, but the ground here was torn and split open as if by a convulsion from underneath. A stream flowed through the field, and it had now turned the area into a lake. On the other hand, there were certain signs that are characteristic of an explosion. Some trees were flattened, or reduced to broken stumps, but others were untouched. The wall between the field and the main road was almost intact, although it ran along the top of a raised mound or dyke, yet a wall much farther away in the next field had been scattered over a wide area.

  There were also, of course, the disfigured human and animal relics that we had expected to find; shreds of skin, fragments of bone. Few of them were identifiable; the explosion seemed to have fragmented every living creature in the field. The donkey’s leg found by the farmer was the largest segment recovered.

  I was soon feeling severely sick, and had to go and sit in the car, but Urquart limped around for over an hour, picking up various fragments. I heard a police sergeant ask him what he was looking for, and Urquart said he didn’t know. But I knew; he was hoping for some definite evidence to connect the gypsies with Mu. And somehow, I was certain that he wouldn’t find it.

  By now there must have been a thousand sightseers around the area, trying to approach closely enough to find out what happened. Our car was stopped a dozen or more times as we tried to drive away. Urquart told everyone who asked him that he thought a flying saucer had exploded.

  In fact, we were both fairly certain what had happened. I believe that old Chickno had gone too far—that he told me too much. Urquart thinks that his chief mistake was to think of the Lloigor as somehow human, and of himself as their servant, entitled to take certain liberties. He failed to realise that he was completely dispensable, and that his naive tendency to boast and present himself as an ambassador of the Lloigor made him dangerous to them.

  We reached this conclusion after I had described my talk with Chickno to Urquart. When I had finished reading him my notes, Urquart said, “No wonder they killed him.”

  “But he didn’t say much, after all.”

  “He said enough. And perhaps they thought we could guess more than he said.”

  We had lunch in the hotel, and regretted it. Everyone seemed to know where we had been, and they stared at us and tried to overhear our conversation. The waiter spent so much time hanging about in the area of our table that the manager finally had to reprimand him. We ate as quickly as we could and went back to Urquart’s house. There was a fire in the library again, and Mrs. Dolgelly brought in coffee.

  I can still remember every moment of that afternoon. There was a sense of tension and foreboding, of physical danger. What had impressed Urquart most was old Chickno’s scorn when I told him that Urquart thought “they” had no real power. I still remember that stream of contemptuous bad language that had made several people in the pub turn their heads. And Chickno had been proved right. “They” had plenty of power—several kinds of power. For we reached the conclusion that the devastation of the gypsy encampment was neither earthquake nor explosion, but some kind of mixture of both. An explosion violent enough to rip apart the caravans would have been heard clearly in Southport and Melincourt, and most certainly in Llandalffen, barely five miles away. The clefts and cracks in the earth suggested a convulsion of the ground. But a convulsion of the ground would not have torn apart
the caravans. Urquart believed—and I finally agreed with him—that the caravans and their inhabitants had been literally torn apart. But in that case, what was the purpose of the convulsion of the earth? There were two possible explanations. This had happened as the “creatures” forced their way from underground. Or the “earthquake” was a deliberate false trail, a red herring. And the consequences that followed from such a supposition were so frightening that we poured ourselves whiskies, although it was only midafternoon. It meant that “they” were anxious to provide an apparently natural explanation for what had happened. And that meant they had a reason for secrecy. And, as far as we could see, there could only be one reason: they had “plans,” plans for the future. I recalled Chickno’s words: “This is their world anyway.… They want it back again.”

  The frustrating thing was that, in all his books on occultism and the history of Mu, Urquart had nothing that suggested an answer. It was hard to fight off a paralysed feeling of hopelessness, of not knowing where to begin. The evening paper increased the depression, for it stated confidently that the explosion had been caused by nitroglycerine! The “experts” had come up with a theory that seemed to explain the facts. Chickno’s son and son-in-law had worked in stone quarries in the north, and were used to handling explosives. Nitroglycerine was occasionally used in these quarries because of its cheapness and because it is easy to manufacture. According to the newspaper report, Chickno’s sons were suspected of stealing quantities of glycerine, and of nitric and sulphuric acid. Their intention, said the report, was to use them for blowing safes. They must have manufactured fairly large quantities of the nitroglycerine, and some kind of earth tremor set it off.

  It was an absurd explanation; it would have taken a ton of nitroglycerine to do so much damage. In any case, a nitroglycerine explosion leaves behind characteristic signs; there were no such signs in the devastated field. A nitroglycerine explosion can be heard; no one heard it.