My tale had been called “The Attic Window,” and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers.5 In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops;6 but New England didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana,7 and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s houses at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair grey. All this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestor’s chest and back which the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.
It had been an eldritch8 thing—no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface—so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom—we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron strait-jacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.
Cotton Mather, in that dæmoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark,9 minced no words as he flung forth his anathema.10 Stern as a Jewish prophet,11 and laconically unamazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man—the thing with the blemished eye—and of the screaming drunken wretch that they hanged for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell—there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.
It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of ape-like claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves12 and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was, dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With the years the legends take on a spectral character—I suppose the thing, if it was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously—all the more hideous because it was so secret.
During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed that windows retained latent images of those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.
Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had collected among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the last two generations—perhaps dying for lack of being thought about. Moreover, so far as æsthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous13 and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature? Moulded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?
The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.
“But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I have seen it.”
“And did you find anything there—in the attic or anywhere else?”
“There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy saw—if he was sensitive he wouldn’t have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it must have been an hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don’t think I was a fool—you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine.”
At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. But his curiosity was undeterred.
“And what about the window-panes?”
“They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in the other there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind—the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don’t believe they’ve had any glass for an hundred years or more—maybe the boy broke ’em if he got that far; the legend doesn’t say.”
Manton was reflecting again.
“I’d like to see that house, Carter.14 Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an inscription—the whole thing must be a bit terrible.”
“You did see it—until it got dark.”15
My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless theatrica
lism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that dæmoniac attic window.
Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mould of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant.
Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary’s Hospital.16 Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull—though the animal was a difficult thing to place and account for.17
After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question:
“Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars—was it like that?”
And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected—
“No—it wasn’t that way at all. It was everywhere—a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory.18 There were eyes—and a blemish. It was the pit—the maelstrom19—the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”
1. The story first appeared in Weird Tales 6, no. 1 (July 1925), 78–82, and was written in September 1923.
Poster from The Unnamable (1988).
2. This presumably refers to Conan Doyle’s public embrace of Spiritualism, which occurred in 1887. Spiritualism, although greatly misunderstood today, was a serious effort to put religion, and all matters regarded as pertaining to the afterlife, within the framework of science rather than faith. Congregationalism is a body of independent churches (independent, that is, from the Protestant, Episcopalian, Baptist, and Catholic churches).
3. The town is not named but may be Marblehead, Massachusetts. In “The Silver Key” (here, below), Carter is to be found in Kingsport, which S. T. Joshi identifies as Marblehead (see “The Festival,” note 7, above). However, “witch-haunted” Salem seems equally likely, and in a letter in 1927, Lovecraft pointed out “an ancient slab half engulfed by a giant willow in the middle of the Charles St. Burying Ground in Salem” (Lovecraft to Bernard Austin Dwyer, June 1927, Selected Letters, II, 139).
4. In the same 1927 letter (see note 3, above), Lovecraft reported that the “genuine old New England superstition . . . —that one about the faces of past generations becoming fixed on windows was told to me and believed by a highly intelligent old lady who has a successful novel and other important literary work to her credit.”
5. Life imitates art: Whispers began its life as a magazine in the 1970s, named after this suggestion.
6. Carter’s work share the fate of C. M. Eddy’s story “The Loved Dead,” which appeared in the May–June–July issue of Weird Tales and suffered similar suppression.
7. Published in 1702; see “The Picture in the House,” note 12, above.
8. See “The Hound,” note 2, above.
9. The sixth book of Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana is “Remarkables of the Divine Providence, Among the People of New-England,” and the relevant chapter is “Thaumatographia Pneumatica” (Wonders of the Spirit World), with this subtitle “Relating the Wonders of the Invisible World in Preternatural Occurrences.”
10. That is, a denunciation.
11. Traditionally, the Jewish prophets are Abraham, Moses, Miriam, Isaiah, Samuel, Ezekiel, Malachi, and Job, as well as the later seers Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Daniel is not termed a prophet. Modern scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel, in The Prophets, argues that “[p]rophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words (5–6).”
12. The split or cloven hoof is a physical characteristic of deer and goats but is also traditionally associated with the devil.
13. See “Dagon,” note 6, above.
14. Note that the narrator is “Carter,” likely Randolph Carter, who appears in several other tales in this volume. See “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” note 2, above. However, the skepticism of this Carter contradicts the experiences of Randolph Carter.
15. Carter means that the neighboring house, described earlier as “a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house,” is the very house featured in the story he has related.
16. The closest “St. Mary’s Hospital” was in Dorchester, a southern suburb of Boston, about twenty miles from Marblehead and farther from Salem. It is likely that this is a concealment of Mary A. Alley Hospital, a small emergency hospital donated in 1904 to the town of Marblehead by Mary Alley, a teacher, nurse, and founder of the Soldiers Aid Society during the Civil War. The hospital opened in 1921 and continued until 1953; it was subsequently sold as condominiums.
Mary Alley, founder of the Mary A. Alley Hospital, renamed “St. Mary’s.”
17. Of course, no bull has a split hoof.
18. James Arthur Anderson, in Out of the Shadows: A Structuralist Approach to Understanding the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, points out that the essence of the “unnamable” is that because it cannot be named, it cannot be catalogued, controlled, or defeated (96). While the clever S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters in fact illustrates, classifies, and describes Lovecraft’s creations in detail, not even that volume describes or illustrates the “unnamable.”
19. The Maelstrom is a large whirlpool off the coast of Norway, the Moskstraumen, a tidal current in the Lofoten islands; its name has been appropriated for any large vortex. Note that Manton falls back on Edgar Allan Poe’s titles for various terrors to describe the unnamable: “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “A Descent into the Maelström.”
The Call of Cthulhu1
Weird Tales 11, no. 2 (February 1928) (artist: Hugh Rankin)
“The Call of Cthulhu” is a monumental achievement. Although some term it a mere expansion of “Dagon,” it is much more. It is Lovecraft’s first mature work, with carefully crafted narrative within narrative within narrative, dubious narrators, and a tone that builds from calm reflection of the enormity of the primary narrator’s task to a fevered expression of the ultimate horror he discovers. It is also the first comprehensive view of Lovecraft’s cosmicism. As Fritz Leiber observed, here for the first time Lovecraft moves horror from the realm of Earth to the stars. This story is founded on his “anti-mythology,” in the phrase of David Schultz. Unlike mythology, which, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “reconcile[s] waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans [fearful and fascinating mystery] of t
his universe,”2 Lovecraft’s anti-mythology informs humankind of the impossibility of an understanding of the universe. As we have seen, his followers, rather than Lovecraft himself, gave a name to his cosmogony: the Cthulhu Mythos. His own intentions were rediscovered by modern critics through careful readings of his letters.
[Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston,3 of Boston]
Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .
—ALGERNON BLACKWOOD4
I. THE HORROR IN CLAY
THE MOST MERCIFUL thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 25