I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder dæmons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced.
Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality;72 for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its æon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions73 of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a dæmon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating74 chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin,
and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
1. The story first appeared in Weird Tales 11, no. 2 (February 1928), 159–78, 287, but it was likely written in August or September 1926, based on earlier outlining. It was rejected by Weird Stories in its initial form, rewritten in July 1927, and subsequently published.
2. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, vol. 4: Creative Mythology (New York: Penguin, 1991), 4.
3. Francis Wayland (1796–1865) was president of Brown University from 1827 to 1855 and was a well-known Providence resident. Howard Thurston (1869–1936) was the most famous stage magician in the world. Peter Cannon, in his shrewd and succinct biographical assessment of Thurston (“The Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston: Lovecraft’s Last Dilettante”), concludes, “Probably only an educated and cultured person, possessed of unlimited wealth and time, and free of emotional encumbrances, could have cracked the global Cthulhu conspiracy.” (39)
4. From his novel The Centaur, published in 1911. Lovecraft regarded Blackwood’s “The Willows” as the finest weird tale in literature—see Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Lovecraft slightly misquotes the original, which uses the phrase “her Consciousness,” not “consciousness,” in referring to what Blackwood calls the “Being of the Earth.” This misquotation is pointed out in a letter by Thomas G. Cockcroft to the editor of Nyctalops.
5. Those who speculate about the nature of the soul; in particular, those who espouse the system of beliefs and teachings of the Theosophical Society, founded in New York City in 1875, incorporating aspects of Buddhism and Brahmanism, especially the belief in reincarnation and spiritual evolution. See the discussion of its central text, the Book of Dzyan, in “The Haunter of the Dark,” note 14, below.
6. Founded in 1764, it is the seventh oldest educational institution in America. It is sited on College Hill, on the east side of Providence. As a prominent feature of Providence, it is mentioned in several other stories set there or in the vicinity, including The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and “The Haunter of the Dark,” below.
7. A regular boat service between Providence and Newport, Rhode Island, along Narragansett Bay.
8. College Hill. Henry L. P. Beckwith Jr., in Lovecraft’s Providence & Adjacent Parts, contends that the intersection of Williams Street and the former Well Street is “almost certainly” the scene of the death of Professor Angell (65).
9. The Archaeological Institute of America was founded in 1879, and a local society in Boston in 1884, but the institute disclaims all knowledge of Professor Angell’s papers (private communication with the editor).
10. A bas-relief is a fixed sculptural form, usually molded to the face of a building with slightly raised figures or images.
11. Cubism originated with paintings produced by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1907–9 that, to the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, seemed to consist of “bizarre cubiques” and “little cubes”; the first public Cubist exhibition, which included neither Picasso nor Braque, occurred in 1911, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Among the artists represented were Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes. Cubism (along with a lesser-known idiom, Divisionism) influenced Futurism, a literary and artistic movement that originated in Italy in 1908–10 and which glorified speed and machinery, rejecting the past. Its precepts were explained by the writer and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” a lengthy piece printed on the front page of Le Figaro (February 20, 1909), the French newspaper: “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the [190 BCE Greek sculpture] Victory of Samothrace” (R. W. Flint, ed., Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings/F. T. Marinetti, 47–52). Futurism influenced Art Deco, Surrealism, and Dada, among other artistic schools.
Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910), a fine example of Futurist painting.
Pablo Picasso’s Figure dans un Fauteuil (Figure in an Armchair) (1909–10), an early Cubist work.
12. In “The Dunwich Chimera and Others: Correlating the Cthulhu Mythos,” Will Murray argues that there is only one creature in folklore that resembles Cthulhu, the Kraken, the gigantic sea creature first described in Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan’s The Natural History of Norway (1755): “‘It is called the Kraken, Kraxen, or some name it Krabben, that word being applied by way of eminences to this creature. This last name seems indeed best to agree with the description of this creature, which is round, flat, and full of arms, or branches.’” According to legend, there were only two such creatures, nearly immortal and said to rise with the apocalypse. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1830 poem “The Kraken,” describing the creature and its legend, says Murray, must have been familiar to Lovecraft.
13. Lovecraft gave directions for the pronunciation of the name: “ . . . the word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. The name of the hellish entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man’s, hence it has no relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike ours, hence could never be uttered perfectly by human throats. . . . Up to the time of the story, when Prof. Angell became interested in the matter, there had never been any attempt to render the name of the hellish R’lyeh monster in our alphabet—, although Abdul Alhazred made an attempt in Arabic letters, which was repeated in Greek by the Byzantine translator. The Latin translator merely copied the Greek. The letters CTHULHU were merely what Prof. Angell devised to represent (roughly and imperfectly, of course) the dream-name orally mouthed to him by the young artist Wilcox. The actual sound—as near as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlûl’-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h represents the guttural thickness” (Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, July 23, 1934, Selected Letters, V, 10–11). Of course, how could Lovecraft know?
Note that this is the first name ascribed by Lovecraft to a supernatural being. While earlier tales describe Earth gods, “other” gods, elder gods, and so forth, none has been hitherto named. See Appendix 4 for a detailed genealogy of the named beings.
Fleur de Lys House, in 2006. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2
006, reprinted with permission
14. This is a real address, and the house there, Fleur de Lys, is exceedingly strange in appearance, its exterior covered with bas-reliefs. It is described by the Providence Art Club (see note 21, below) as having a “Norman, half-timbered facade.” Erected in 1885 by Sydney Richmond Burleigh, Fleur de Lys now serves as an art studio—having been deeded to the art club in 1939 by Burleigh’s wife—and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Curiously, Thomas Street is the continuation of Angell Street in Providence, suggesting a source for the disguised name of the narrator’s great-uncle. Lovecraft himself was born at 454 Angell Street and lived there until he was eleven. He lived at 598 Angell Street for an additional twenty years, from 1904 to 1924.
598 Angell Street, in 2003. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2003, reprinted with permission
15. This is a fictitious address.
16. William Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis was published in 1896, The Lost Lemuria in 1904. A combined edition first appeared in 1925. All three works were published by the Theosophical Publishing Society. Scott-Elliot was an investment banker and an amateur anthropologist who joined the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society before 1893. Professor Angell would also have consulted the Minnesota politician Ignatius Donnelly’s popular Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), which propounded the idea that the legendary island, first described in a Socratic dialogue by Plato in 360 BCE, was an actual place, the font of many ancient civilizations.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 29