I had not set foot in the house one minute before I sensed the strange, brooding aspect of it. There seemed a closeness in the air, a feeling of tense expectancy as if something, I know not what, were waiting—waiting for a moment to strike. A curious smell seemed to waft into my nostrils—an odd stench as of something musty and long dead. I felt troubled.
Eliphas came in shortly after I had arrived. He had been out somewhere—he did not vouchsafe where—and it seemed to me that his shoes were curiously dirtied, as if he had been digging deep into the dusty soil; his hair was curiously disarranged. He spoke to me civilly enough and was sharply interested when he heard that I was studying at Miskatonic University. He asked me animatedly whether or not I had heard of the famous copy of the Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, which is one of the most prized possessions of the University. I was forced to reply in the negative, at which he seemed oddly displeased. For a moment, I thought he was going to leave abruptly, but then he checked himself, made an odd motion in the air with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and started discussing the singular weather we had been having.
It had started by being an unusually hot summer, but a few days ago the weather had changed suddenly to a curious dry chill. At night a wind would arise which seemed to sweep down from the hills beyond Arkham, bearing with it an odd fishy stench. Most of the old-timers remarked on its oddness, and one or two compared it to the strange wind of the Dark Day of 1875, about which they failed to elucidate.
I saw Eliphas Snodgrass several times more that summer, and each time he seemed more preoccupied and strange than before. At one time he cornered me and begged me to try to borrow the volume of Alhazred from the library for him. He had been refused access to it by the librarian, a most learned man who evidently made it a practice to refuse consultation with that book, and others of similar ilk, to persons of a certain nervous type.
I well remember the night of September 10th. It had started out as a typical hot day of late summer; toward evening it grew chill, and, as the sun set, a high wind sprang up. Dark clouds seemed to arise out of nowhere and very shortly a gale was blowing down from the hills and lightning was crackling far in the distance.
Along about twelve o’clock, a curious lull occurred which lasted for about ten minutes. I recall it well for at that moment a stench of mustiness seeped into the town, drenching every house and person. I had been reading late and I stopped as the smell assailed me, and realization that the storm had ceased came to me. I stepped to the window, pulled up the shades, and stared out.
Outside, the sky was a dead black. There was a pregnant stillness in the air, and a thin, miasmatic mist hung all about. Then like a bolt from the blue there came a terrific clap of thunder and with it a startling green flash of lightning which seemed to strike somewhere in Arkham and linger. I remember being amazed at the fact that I had heard the thunder before seeing the lightning, rather than after.
Immediately after this remarkable phenomenon, the storm broke out in renewed fury and continued several more hours.
I was awakened in the morning by the insistent ringing of the telephone. My aunt, who answered it, knocked on the door shortly after and bade me dress. It seemed that it was the Crombleigh house that had been the resting point of the odd lightning. Nothing was damaged, but Eliphas Snodgrass was missing.
I rushed over. As I neared the house, I could sense the smell, and upon crossing the threshold, I was virtually bowled over by the odor of dead and decaying fish which permeated the place. The stench had come when the lightning struck, Mrs. Snodgrass told me, and they were trying desperately to air it out. It had been much worse than it was now.
Overcoming my repugnance, I went in and climbed the steps to Eliphas’ room. It was in dreadful disorder, as if someone had left hurriedly. I was told that a bag had been packed and was missing. Eliphas’ bed had not been slept in; the room was strewn with books, manuscripts, papers, diaries, and curious old relics.
During the next days, while elsewhere state police and federal authorities were making a futile search for young Snodgrass, I went over the items I had found in his room. I shudder at the terrible notes and the things they implied.
Primarily, I found a notebook, the sort children use for copying lessons, in which I seemed to sense a series of clues. Evidently Snodgrass kept memoranda in it. There was a yellowed newspaper clipping from some San Francisco paper, which said in part:
FREIGHTER IN PORT WITH STRANGE TALE
The Kungshavn arrives with story
of Boiling Sea and Sinking Islands.
San Francisco: The Swedish freighter Kungshavn arrived in port today with its crew telling a strange story of a weird storm at sea, and almost incredible manifestations. Most of the crew were reluctant to speak of it, but reporters drew out a fantastictale of a sudden storm which hit the ship two days out of New Guinea, of a terrible waterspout that pursued the ship for five hours in the semi-darkness of the storm, and of an island that seemed to sink into the water before their very eyes, and of sailing through a sea of boiling, bubbling water for two solid hours. Third Mate Swenson, who seemed most deeply overcome by the experience, kept praying and mumbling of a terribledemon or sea-monster whom he called Kichulu or Kithuhu.
The clipping went on for several more paragraphs, giving mainly further details on the above.
Following this was another clipping from the same paper, but dated several days after. This reported the sudden death of one Olaf Swenson, a member of the crew of the Kungshavn, who was found in a back alley of San Francisco with his face chewed off.
Beside this clipping, the oddly crabbed handwriting of Eliphas Snodgrass read: “Kichulu—does he mean Cthulhu?”
This meant nothing to me at the time. Oh, would that it had! Perhaps I still might have saved Eliphas.
Then there was a note in Eliphas’ handwriting:
Tuesday must say the Dho chant and widdershin six times. Hastur is ascendant. Dagon recumbent? Must investigate. See Lovecraft on the proper incantation for Yog-Sototh. Pygnont says he has copy of Eibon for me; must write to him to send it by special messenger. I feel that the time is close. I must consult Alhazred—must find a way to obtain the volume. It is all in the old Arab’s book; he bungled; I must not. So little time. The Day of Blackness is approaching. I must be ready. Lloigor protect me.
After this, there was a sheaf of pages crammed with what looked like chemical and astrological configurations.
I felt very disturbed after reading the above. It was so out of the ordinary. I have but one thing more to mention from that investigation. On the ceiling of Eliphas’ room was a curious, wide wet mark. I knew that the roof leaked, but still it was sinister.
Gradually the city settled back to normal. Normal! When I think now what a horror was amongst us, I shudder that we can say such things as “back to normal.” The stench in the Snodgrass home gradually abated.
I went back about my studies and soon had almost forgotten Eliphas. It was not until the early winter that the matter came up again. At that time, Mrs. Snodgrass called to say that she had heard footsteps in the dead of night in Eliphas’ room, and thought she had heard conversations: yet, when she knocked, there was no one there.
I returned with Mrs. Snodgrass to the Crombleigh mansion and re-entered Eliphas’ chamber. She had placed the room in order, carefully filing the papers and objects. I thought nothing was out of place until I chanced to glance up at the ceiling. There were wet footprints against the white kalsomine of the ceiling—footprints leading across from the top of the door to where the large closet opened!
I went at once to the closet; at first glance nothing was wrong. Then I noticed a bit of paper lying on the floor. I picked it up. On it was written one word in a hand unmistakably that of the missing student.
One word—“Alhazred”!
As soon as I was free, I went to Miskatonic University and secured permission to peruse that damnable volume by Abdul Alhazred. Would that I had
not! Would that I had forgotten the whole affair!
Never will I forget the terrible knowledge that entered my brain during those hours when I sat reading the horror-filled pages of that loathsome book. The demoniac abnormalities that assailed my mind with indisputable truth will forever shake my faith in the world. The book should be destroyed; it is the encyclopedia of madness. All that afternoon I read those madness-filled pages and it was well into the night before I came across the passage which answered my riddle. I will not say what it was for I dare not. Yet I started back in dread; what I saw there was horror manifold. And I knew that I must act at once, that very night, or all would be lost. Perhaps all was lost already. I rushed out of the library into the darkness of the night.
A strange snow was falling, a curious flickering snow that fell like phantoms in the darkness. Through it I ran across block after endless block of ancient houses to the Snodgrass mansion. As I came down the street, I thought I saw a flicker of green outlined against the roof. I redoubled my pace and dashing up their porch, hammered upon the door. It was near twelve and it took some time before the family let me in. Hastily I said I had to make another search of Eliphas’ room and they let me pass. I dashed up the stairs and threw open the door of his chamber. It was dark and I flicked on the light.
Shall I ever forget the terrible thing I saw there? The horror, the dread, the madness seemed too much for the human mind to bear. I flicked the light off at once, and, closing the door, fled screaming out into the street. Well it was that a raging fire broke out immediately afterward and burned that accursed house to the ground. Well—for such a damnable thing must not be, must never be on this world.
If man but knew the screaming madness that lurks in the bowels of the land and the depths of the ocean, if he but caught one glimpse of the things that await in the vast empty depths of the hideous cosmos! If he knew the secret significance of the flickering of the stars! If the discovery of Pluto had struck him as the omen it was!
If man knew, I think that knowledge would burn out the brains of every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth. Such things must never be known. Such unspeakable, unfathomable evil must never be allowed to seep into the mentalities of men lest all go up in chaos and madness.
How am I to say what I saw in the room of that cursed house? As I opened the door, there on the bedspread, revealed by the sudden flash of the electric light, lay the still quivering big toe of Eliphas Snodgrass!
To Arkham and the Stars
Fritz Leiber
Early on the evening of September 14th last I stepped down onto the venerable brick platform of the Arkham station of the Boston and Maine Railroad. I could have flown in, arriving at the fine new Arkham Airport north of town, where I am told a suburb of quite tasteful Modern Colonial homes now covers most of Meadow Hill, but I found the older conveyance convenient and congenial.
Since I was carrying only a small valise and a flat square cardboard box of trifling weight, I elected to walk the three blocks to the Arkham House. Midway across the old Garrison Street Bridge, which repaired and re-surfaced only ten years ago spans the rushing Miskatonic there, I paused to survey the city from that modest eminence, setting down my valise and resting my hand on the old iron railing while an occasional dinner-time car rumbled past close beside me.
To my right, just this side of the West Street Bridge where the Miskatonic begins its northward swing, there crouched in the rapid current the ill-regarded little island of gray standing stones, where as I had read in The Arkham Advertiser I have sent me, a group of bearded bongo-drumming delinquents had recently been arrested while celebrating a black mass in honor of Castro—or so one of them had wildly and outrageously asserted. (For a brief moment my thoughts turned queerly to Old Castro of the Cthulhu Cult.) Beyond the island and across the turn of the river loomed Hangman’s Hill, now quite built-up, from behind which the sun was sending a spectral yellow afterglow. By this pale gloom-shot golden light I saw that Arkham is still a city of trees, with many a fine oak and maple, although the elms are all gone, victims of the Dutch disease, and that there are still many gambrel roofs to be seen among the newer tops. To my left I studied the new freeway where it cuts across the foot of French Hill above Powder Mill Street, providing rapid access to the missile-component, machine-tool, and chemical plants southeast of the city. My gaze dropping down and swinging south searched for a moment for the old Witch-House before I remembered it had been razed as long ago as 1931 and the then moldering tenements of the Polish Quarter have largely been replaced by a modest housing development in Colonial urban style, while the newest “foreigners” to crowd the city are the Puerto Ricans and the Negroes.
Taking up my valise, I descended the bridge and continued across River Street, past the rosily mellowed red-brick slant-roofed stout old warehouses which have happily escaped demolition. At the Arkham I confirmed my reservation and checked my valise with the pleasant elderly desk clerk, but, since I had dined early in Boston, I pressed on at once south on Garrison across Church to the University, continuing to carry my cardboard box.
The first academic edifices to interrupt my gaze were the new Administration Building and beyond it the Pickman Nuclear Laboratory, where Miskatonic has expanded east across Garrison, though of course without disturbing the Burying Ground at Lich and Parsonage. Both additions to the University struck me as magnificent structures, wholly compatible with the old quadrangle, and I gave silent thanks to the architect who had been so mindful of tradition.
It was full twilight now and several windows glowed in the nearer edifice, where faculty members must be carrying on the increasing paper work of the University. But before proceeding toward the room, behind one of the windows, which was my immediate destination, I took thoughtful note of the orderly student anti-segregation demonstration that was being carried on at the edge of campus in sympathy with similar demonstrations in southern cities. I observed that one of the placards read “Mazurewicz and Desrochers for Selectmen,” showing me that the students must be taking a close interest in the government of the University city and making me wonder if those candidates were sons of the barely literate individuals innocently mixed up in the Witch-House case. Tempora mutantur!
Inside the pleasant corridors of the Administration Building I quickly found the sanctum of the Chairman of the Department of Literature. The slender silver-haired Professor Albert Wilmarth, hardly looking his more than seventy years, greeted me warmly though with that mocking sardonic note which has caused some to call him “unpleasantly” rather than simply “very” erudite. Before winding up his work, he courteously explained its nature.
“I have been getting off a refutation of some whippersnapper’s claim that the late Young Gentleman of Providence who recorded so well so many of the weirder doings around Arkham was a ‘horrifying figure’ whose ‘closest relation is with Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf murderer, who admitted that his days in solitary confinement were spent conjuring up sexual-sadistic fantasies.’ Great God, doesn’t the sapless youngster know that all normal men have sexual-sadistic fantasies? Even supposing that the literary fantasies of the late Young Gentleman had a deliberate sexual element and were indeed fantasies!” Turning from me with a somewhat sinister chuckle, he said to his attractive secretary, “Now remember, Miss Tilton, that goes to Colin Wilson, not Edmund—I took care of Edmund very thoroughly in an earlier letter! Carbon copies to Avram Davidson and Damon Knight. And while you’re at it, see that they go out from the Hangman’s Hill sub-station—I’d like them to carry that postmark!”
Getting his hat and a light topcoat and hesitating a moment at a mirror to assure himself that his high collar was spotless, the venerable yet sprightly Wilmarth led me out of the Administration Building back across Garrison to the old quadrangle, ignoring the traffic which dodged around us. On the way he replied in answer to a remark of mine, “Yes, the architecture is damned good. Both it and the Pickman Lab—and the new Polish Quarter apartment development,
too—were designed by Daniel Upton, who as you probably know has had a distinguished career ever since he was given a clean bill of mental health and discharged with a verdict of ‘justified homicide’ after he shot Asenath or rather old Ephraim Waite in the body of his friend Edward Derby. For a time that verdict got us almost as much criticism as the Lizzie Borden acquittal got Fall River, but it was well worth it!
“Young Danforth’s another who’s returned to us from the asylum—and permanently too, now that Morgan’s research in mescaline and LSD has turned up those clever anti-hallucinogens,” my conductor continued as we passed between the museum and the library where a successor of the great watchdog that had destroyed Wilbur Whateley clinked his chain as he paced in the shadows. “Young Danforth—Gad, he’s nearly as old as I!—you know, the brilliant graduate assistant who survived with old Dyer the worst with which the Antarctic could face them back in ’30 and ’31. Danforth’s gone into psychology, like Peaslee’s Wingate and old Peaslee himself—it’s a therapeutic vocation. Just now he’s deep in a paper on Asenath Waite, showing she’s quite as much an Anima-figure—that is, devouring witch-mother and glamorous fatal witch-girl—as Carl Jung maintained Haggard’s Ayesha and William Sloane’s Selena were.”
“But surely there’s a difference there,” I objected somewhat hesitatingly. “Sloane’s and Haggard’s women were fictional. You can’t be implying, can you, that Asenath was a figment of the imagination of the Young Gentleman who wrote The Thing on the Doorstep?—or rather fictionalized Upton’s rough account. Besides, it wasn’t really Asenath but Ephraim, as you pointed out yourself a moment ago.”
“Of course, of course,” Wilmarth quickly replied with another of those sinister and—yes, I must confess it—unpleasant chuckles. He added blandly, “But old Ephraim lends just the proper fierce male component to the Anima-figure—and after you’ve spent an adult lifetime at Miskatonic, you discover you’ve developed a rather different understanding from the herd’s of the distinction between the imaginary and the real. Come along now.”
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Page 41