Eldritch Tales

by H. P. Lovecraft

  In form the discovery resembles an ordinary notebook, about 5 x 3 inches in size, and containing thirty leaves. In material, however, it presents marked peculiarities. The covers are apparently of some dark stony substance unknown to geologists, and unbreakable by any mechanical means. No chemical reagent seems to act upon them. The leaves are much the same, save that they are lighter in colour, and so infinitely thin as to be quite flexible. The whole is bound by some process not very clear to those who have observed it; a process involving the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance. These substances cannot now be separated, nor can the leaves be torn by any amount of force. The writing is Greek of the purest classical quality, and several students of palaeography declare that the characters are in a cursive hand used about the second century BC. There is little in the text to determine the date. The mechanical mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact that it must have resembled that of the modern slate and slate-pencil. During the course of analytical efforts made by the late Prof. Chambers of Harvard, several pages, mostly at the conclusion of the narrative, were blurred to the point of utter effacement before being read; a circumstance forming a well-nigh irreparable loss. What remains of the contents was done into modern Greek letters by the palaeographer Rutherford and in this form submitted to the translators.

  Prof. Mayfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who examined samples of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite; an opinion in which Dr. von Winterfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in 1918 as a dangerous enemy alien) does not concur. Prof. Bradley of Columbia College adopts a less dogmatic ground; pointing out that certain utterly unknown ingredients are present in large quantities, and warning that no classification is as yet possible.

  The presence, nature, and message of the strange book form so momentous a problem, that no explanation can even be attempted. The text, as far as preserved, is here rendered as literally as our language permits, in the hope that some reader may eventually hit upon an interpretation and solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of recent years.

  —E.N.B.–L.T., Jun.

  (The Story)

  IT WAS A NARROW PLACE, and I was alone. On one side, beyond a margin of vivid waving green, was the sea; blue, bright, and billowy, and sending up vaporous exhalations which intoxicated me. So profuse, indeed, were these exhalations, that they gave me an odd impression of a coalescence of sea and sky; for the heavens were likewise bright and blue. On the other side was the forest, ancient almost as the sea itself, and stretching infinitely inland. It was very dark, for the trees were grotesquely huge and luxuriant, and incredibly numerous. Their giant trunks were of a horrible green which blended weirdly with the narrow green tract whereon I stood. At some distance away, on either side of me, the strange forest extended down to the water’s edge; obliterating the shore line and completely hemming in the narrow tract. Some of the trees, I observed, stood in the water itself; as though impatient of any barrier to their progress.

  I saw no living thing, nor sign that any living thing save myself had ever existed. The sea and the sky and the wood encircled me, and reached off into regions beyond my imagination. Nor was there any sound save of the wind-tossed wood and of the sea.

  As I stood in this silent place, I suddenly commenced to tremble; for though I knew not how I came there, and could scarce remember what my name and rank had been, I felt that I should go mad if I could understand what lurked about me. I recalled things I had learned, things I had dreamed, things I had imagined and yearned for in some other distant life. I thought of long nights when I had gazed up at the stars of heaven and cursed the gods that my free soul could not traverse the vast abysses which were inaccessible to my body. I conjured up ancient blasphemies, and terrible delvings into the papyri of Democritus; but as memories appeared, I shuddered in deeper fear, for I knew that I was alone – horribly alone. Alone, yet close to sentient impulses of vast, vague kind; which I prayed never to comprehend nor encounter. In the voice of the swaying green branches I fancied I could detect a kind of malignant hatred and daemoniac triumph. Sometimes they struck me as being in horrible colloquy with ghastly and unthinkable things which the scaly green bodies of the trees half hid; hid from sight but not from consciousness. The most oppressive of my sensations was a sinister feeling of alienage. Though I saw about me objects which I could name – trees, grass, sea, and sky; I felt that their relation to me was not the same as that of the trees, grass, sea, and sky I knew in another and dimly remembered life. The nature of the difference I could not tell, yet I shook in stark fright as it impressed itself upon me.

  And then, in a spot where I had before discerned nothing but the misty sea, I beheld the Green Meadow; separated from me by a vast expanse of blue rippling water with sun-tipped wavelets, yet strangely near. Often I would peep fearfully over my right shoulder at the trees, but I preferred to look at the Green Meadow, which affected me oddly.

  It was while my eyes were fixed upon this singular tract, that I first felt the ground in motion beneath me. Beginning with a kind of throbbing agitation which held a fiendish suggestion of conscious action, the bit of bank on which I stood detached itself from the grassy shore and commenced to float away; borne slowly onward as if by some current of resistless force. I did not move, astonished and startled as I was by the unprecedented phenomenon; but stood rigidly still until a wide lane of water yawned betwixt me and the land of trees. Then I sat down in a sort of daze, and again looked at the sun-tipped water and the Green Meadow.

  Behind me the trees and the things they may have been hiding seemed to radiate infinite menace. This I knew without turning to view them, for as I grew more used to the scene I became less and less dependent upon the five senses that once had been my sole reliance. I knew the green scaly forest hated me, yet now I was safe from it, for my bit of bank had drifted far from the shore.

  But though one peril was past, another loomed up before me. Pieces of earth were constantly crumbling from the floating isle which held me, so that death could not be far distant in any event. Yet even then I seemed to sense that death would be death to me no more, for I turned again to watch the Green Meadow, imbued with a curious feeling of security in strange contrast to my general horror.

  Then it was that I heard, at a distance immeasurable, the sound of falling water. Not that of any trivial cascade such as I had known, but that which might be heard in the far Scythian lands if all the Mediterranean were poured down an unfathomable abyss. It was toward this sound that my shrinking island was drifting, yet I was content.

  Far in the rear were happening weird and terrible things; things which I turned to view, yet shivered to behold. For in the sky dark vaporous forms hovered fantastically, brooding over trees and seeming to answer the challenge of the waving green branches. Then a thick mist arose from the sea to join the sky-forms, and the shore was erased from my sight. Though the sun – what sun I knew not – shone brightly on the water around me, the land I had left seemed involved in a daemoniac tempest where clashed the will of the hellish trees and what they hid, with that of the sky and the sea. And when the mist vanished, I saw only the blue sky and the blue sea, for the land and the trees were no more.

  It was at this point that my attention was arrested by the singing in the Green Meadow. Hitherto, as I have said, I had encountered no sign of human life; but now there arose to my ears a dull chant whose origin and nature were apparently unmistakable. While the words were utterly undistinguishable, the chant awaked in me a peculiar train of associations; and I was reminded of some vaguely disquieting lines I had once translated out of an Egyptian book, which in turn were taken from a papyrus of ancient Meroë. Through my brain ran lines that I fear to repeat; lines telling of very antique things and forms of life in the days when our earth was exceeding young. Of things which thought and moved and were alive, yet which gods and men would not consider alive. It was a strange book.

  As I listened, I became gradually conscious of a ci
rcumstance which had before puzzled me only subconsciously. At no time had my sight distinguished any definite objects in the Green Meadow, an impression of vivid homogeneous verdure being the sum total of my perception. Now, however, I saw that the current would cause my island to pass the shore at but a little distance; so that I might learn more of the land and of the singing thereon. My curiosity to behold the singers had mounted high, though it was mingled with apprehension.

  Bits of sod continued to break away from the tiny tract which carried me, but I heeded not their loss; for I felt that I was not to die with the body (or appearance of a body) which I seemed to possess. That everything about me, even life and death, was illusory; that I had overleaped the bounds of mortality and corporeal entity, becoming a free, detached thing; impressed me as almost certain. Of my location I knew nothing, save that I felt I could not be on the earth-planet once so familiar to me. My sensations, apart from a kind of haunting terror, were those of a traveller just embarked upon an unending voyage of discovery. For a moment I thought of the lands and persons I had left behind; and of strange ways whereby I might some day tell them of my adventurings, even though I might never return.

  I had now floated very near the Green Meadow, so that the voices were clear and distinct; but though I knew many languages I could not quite interpret the words of the chanting. Familiar they indeed were, as I had subtly felt when at a greater distance, but beyond a sensation of vague and awesome remembrance I could make nothing of them. A most extraordinary quality in the voices – a quality which I cannot describe – at once frightened and fascinated me. My eyes could now discern several things amidst the omnipresent verdure – rocks, covered with bright green moss, shrubs of considerable height, and less definable shapes of great magnitude which seemed to move or vibrate amidst the shrubbery in a peculiar way. The chanting, whose authors I was so anxious to glimpse, seemed loudest at points where these shapes were most numerous and most vigorously in motion.

  And then, as my island drifted closer and the sound of the distant waterfall grew louder, I saw clearly the source of the chanting, and in one horrible instant remembered everything. Of such things I cannot, dare not tell, for therein was revealed the hideous solution of all which had puzzled me; and that solution would drive you mad, even as it almost drove me … I knew now the change through which I had passed, and through which certain others who once were men had passed! and I knew the endless cycle of the future which none like me may escape … I shall live forever, be conscious forever, though my soul cries out to the gods for the boon of death and oblivion … All is before me: beyond the deafening torrent lies the land of Stethelos, where young men are infinitely old … The Green Meadow. . . I will send a message across the horrible immeasurable abyss …

  [At this point the text becomes illegible.]

  NATHICANA

  IT WAS IN THE PALE garden of Zaïs;

  The mist-shrouded gardens of Zaïs,

  Where blossoms the white nephalotë,

  The redolent herald of midnight.

  There slumber the still lakes of crystal,

  And streamlets that flow without murm’ring;

  Smooth streamlets from caverns of Kathos

  Where brood the calm spirits of twilight.

  And over the lakes and the streamlets

  Are bridges of pure alabaster,

  White bridges all cunningly carven

  With figures of fairies and daemons.

  Here glimmer strange suns and strange planets,

  And strange is the crescent Banapis

  That sets ’yond the ivy-grown ramparts

  Where thickens the dust of the evening.

  Here fall the white vapours of Yabon;

  And here in the swirl of vapours

  I saw the divine Nathicana;

  The garlanded, white Nathicana;

  The slender, black-hair’d Nathicana;

  The sloe-ey’d, red-lipp’d Nathicana;

  The silver-voic’d, sweet Nathicana;

  The pale-rob’d, belov’d Nathicana.

  And ever was she my belovèd,

  From ages when Time was unfashion’d;

  From days when the stars were not fashion’d

  Nor any thing fashion’d but Yabon.

  And here dwelt we ever and ever,

  The innocent children of Zaïs,

  At peace in the paths and the arbours,

  White-crown’d with the blest nephalotë.

  How oft would we float in the twilight

  O’er flow’r-cover’d pastures and hillsides

  All white with the lowly astalthon;

  The lowly yet lovely astalthon,

  And dream in a world made of dreaming

  The dreams that are fairer than Aidenn;

  Bright dreams that are truer than reason!

  So dream’d and so lov’d we thro’ ages,

  Till came the curs’d season of Dzannin;

  The daemon-damn’d season of Dzannin;

  When red shone the suns and the planets,

  And red gleamed the crescent Banapis,

  And red fell the vapours of Yabon.

  Then redden’d the blossoms and streamlets

  And lakes that lay under the bridges,

  And even the calm alabaster

  Glow’d pink with uncanny reflections

  Till all the carv’d fairies and daemons

  Leer’d redly from the backgrounds of shadow.

  Now redden’d my vision, and madly

  I strove to peer thro’ the dense curtain

  And glimpse the divine Nathicana;

  The pure, ever-pale Nathicana;

  The lov’d, the unchang’d Nathicana.

  But vortex on vortex of madness

  Beclouded my labouring vision;

  My damnable, reddening vision

  That built a new world for my seeing;

  A new world of redness and darkness,

  A horrible coma call’d living.

  So now in this coma call’d living

  I view the bright phantoms of beauty;

  The false, hollow phantoms of beauty

  That cloak all the evils of Dzannin.

  I view them with infinite longing,

  So like do they seem to my lov’d one;

  So shapely and fair like my lov’d one;

  Yet foul from their eyes shines their evil;

  Their cruel and pitiless evil,

  More evil than Thaphron and Latgoz,

  Twice ill for its gorgeous concealment.

  And only in slumbers of midnight

  Appears the lost maid Nathicana,

  The pallid, the pure Nathicana,

  Who fades at the glance of the dreamer.

  Again and again do I seek her;

  I woo with deep draughts of Plathotis,

  Deep draughts brew’d in wine of Astarte

  And strengthen’d with tears of long weeping.

  I yearn for the gardens of Zaïs;

  The lovely lost garden of Zaïs

  Where blossoms the white nephalotë,

  The redolent herald of midnight.

  The last potent draught I am brewing;

  A draught that the daemons delight in;

  A draught that will banish the redness;

  The horrible coma call’d living.

  Soon, soon, if I fail not in brewing,

  The redness and madness will vanish,

  And deep in the worm-peopled darkness

  Will rot the base chains that have bound me.

  Once more shall the gardens of Zaïs

  Dawn white on my long-tortur’d vision,

  And there midst the vapours of Yabon

  Will stand the divine Nathicana;

  The deathless, restor’d Nathicana

  Whose like is not met with in living.

  TWO BLACK BOTTLES

  (with Wilfred Blanch Talman)

  NOT ALL OF THE FEW remaining inhabitants of Daalbergen, that dismal little village in the
Ramapo Mountains, believe that my uncle, old Dominie Vanderhoof, is really dead. Some of them believe he is suspended somewhere between heaven and hell because of the old sexton’s curse. If it had not been for that old magician, he might still be preaching in the little damp church across the moor.

  After what has happened to me in Daalbergen, I can almost share the opinion of the villagers. I am not sure that my uncle is dead, but I am very sure that he is not alive upon this earth. There is no doubt that the old sexton buried him once, but he is not in that grave now. I can almost feel him behind me as I write, impelling me to tell the truth about those strange happenings in Daalbergen so many years ago.

  It was the fourth day of October when I arrived at Daalbergen in answer to a summons. The letter was from a former member of my uncle’s congregation, who wrote that the old man had passed away and that there should be some small estate which I, as his only living relative, might inherit. Having reached the secluded little hamlet by a wearying series of changes on branch railways, I found my way to the grocery store of Mark Haines, writer of the letter, and he, leading me into a stuffy back room, told me a peculiar tale concerning Dominie Vanderhoof’s death.

  ‘Y’ should be careful, Hoffman,’ Haines told me, ‘when y’ meet that old sexton, Abel Foster. He’s in league with the devil, sure’s you’re alive. ’Twa’n’t two weeks ago Sam Pryor, when he passed the old graveyard, heared him mumblin ’t’ the dead there. ’Twa’n’t right he should talk that way – an’ Sam does vow that there was a voice answered him – a kind o’ half-voice, hollow and muffled-like, as though it come out o’ th’ ground. There’s others, too, as could tell y’ about seein’ him standin’ afore old Dominie Slott’s grave – that one right agin’ the church wall – a-wringin’ his hands an’ a-talkin’ t’ th’ moss on th’ tombstone as though it was the old Dominie himself.’