The Cthulhu Wars

by Kenneth Hite

  A sudden storm forced White’s relief fleet away from the island before he could mount a more concerted search, and none of the colonists were ever found.

  Places of Dagon

  After Roanoke, English colonization set down deeper roots in Virginia and Massachusetts. In 1625, the barrister Thomas Morton built a trading post on an isolated, hilly peninsula along the Atlantic coast just a few miles from the Puritan colony at Plymouth. He named it “Merrymount” or “Mount Ma-re,” conflating ecstasy and the sea in a fashion hinting at Deep One contacts, possibly from their nearby colony off Devil Reef.

  By 1626, Merrymount had become infamous as the site of heathen ceremonies and disturbing debaucheries performed by English settlers and Native tribesmen alike. According to Plymouth Governor William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, the residents of Merrymount set up a ring of stones and an 80ft “May-pole” carved with queer images and topped with deer antlers, “dancing about it many days together … like so many fairies, or furies rather, and worse practices” such as “revived and celebrated” pagan worship and “beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.” Tensions escalated until Morton declared May Day 1628 the beginning of the “Revels of a New Canaan” and enacted a series of unholy rites and “pagan odes” to Neptune and Triton.

  This last blasphemy roused the Puritan colonists to action. The Plymouth militia under Captain Miles Standish attacked Merrymount that June, taking the town and capturing Morton without a single Puritan casualty. After trial, the Puritans marooned him on the deserted Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire, from which he somehow escaped and returned to England. The sober and fearful Plymouth colonists left the remaining Merrymount settlers to their own devices for nearly a year, evidently hoping that the cult would wither and die without its leader. At this time, Puritan records stop referring to the town as Merrymount. By 1629, Morton’s settlement had instead become widely known as a “place of woe” called Mount Dagon, after the Canaanite sea god its residents were said to have worshipped.

  Throughout Morton’s banishment, storms and famine beset the Puritan settlements across the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Starving settlers from Salem under John Endecott raided Mount Dagon once more: they destroyed the May-pole, looted a large quantity of food from a warren of tunnels and subterranean storerooms, and then burned Mount Dagon to the ground. The remaining denizens returned with the raiders to Salem, some eventually moving north to the sheltered harbor that would become Kingsport in 1639, or to a fertile coastal plain at the mouth of the Manuxet River, where along with newly arrived colonists from the south coast of England they founded Innsmouth in 1643. That same year Morton returned from England to his patron Ferdinand Gorges’ colony in Maine, settling near Newport Lake (now Sebasticook Lake), the site of a fishing weir and cult complex called Sagondagon by the local Algonquians, which dates back to 3000 BC.

  John Dee (1527–1608) served as astrologer, cosmographer, and magus to Queen Elizabeth I, poring over Welsh histories and medieval maps of Hyperborea alike to justify her expansionist policies. He likely acquired his copy of Olaus Wormius’ Latin Necronomicon during a book-buying trip to Flanders in 1562; although he incorporated some of its insights into his Liber Logaeth (1583), the English “Dee translation” is more probably the work of his scryer, the forger Edward Kelley (1555–1597). (Osprey Publishing)

  Shortly after Morton’s return, a fur trader named Richard Billington erected a stone circle outside Plymouth, following instructions from a Wampanoag “wonder-worker” named Misquamacus. Billington “call’d out of the Sky” an NRE named Ossadogowah, apparently with fatal results. After seven mysterious deaths in the woods near Billington’s Stones, in 1645 Governor Bradford ordered the militia to tear down this new “Place of Dagon” and arrest Billington, but the trapper and Misquamacus had by then fallen out. Misquamacus led a mixed band of Wampanoags, Nansets, and Nahiggansets that presumably killed Billington and buried him under a mound of his own stones, still visible 50 years later.

  Minister, antiquarian, and scientist Cotton Mather (1663–1728) encouraged and supported the witch-cult purges in Salem and Arkham. He or agents in his circle also investigated the Salem necromancer Simon Orne, the disappearance of Keziah Mason, an unnamable beast-form in Arkham, and the first Ghoul attacks in Boston. Aside from hints he inserted into his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), Decennium Luctuosum (1699), and Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), we have few records of this first chapter of the Cthulhu War in America. (LOC)

  Witch Trials

  According to contemporary records, “reports of the Idle” located Billington in “divers places,” often as a precursor to witchcraft panic. In 1692, Billington appeared in the woods outside Salem, an area already on edge after the December 1690 lynching of an elderly spinster named Abigail Prinn (née Curwen) for “conversation with a dyvil, formed of living shadow, and of prodigious size.” The phantom “dark man” and rumors of Abigail Prinn’s curse on Salem sparked an explosion of accusations, trials and executions in Essex County throughout 1692 and 1693.

  Abigail Prinn may have been one of the most powerful witches, but her aged sister-in-law, the widow Keziah Mason of Arkham, had supposedly been the most learned. The elusive Mason was one of the last of the Essex County witches to be formally accused (though she was one of the first suspected), and unlike many others the confession of heresy she gave was apparently sincere and uncoerced. Only days into her incarceration while awaiting execution, Keziah Mason vanished from Salem Gaol.

  Although the vast majority of the witchcraft allegations were disingenuous or at least mistaken, some reflect a genuine occult practice extant throughout the colonies. The Reverend George Burroughs, hanged in 1692, had lived in Maine among the Pennacook, and revived Morton’s cult when he returned. One Hepzibah Lawson swore on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge Hathorne, that “fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson’s house,” and one Amity How declared at a session of August 8 before Judge Gedney that “Mr. G. B. [Reverend George Burroughs] on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.” Some of the suspected fled before they could be accused, among them the rumored wizards Edward Hutchinson and Edmund Carter, the Bishop and Whateley families who founded Dunwich that year, and Prinn’s son Joseph.

  The Case of Joseph Curwen

  Joseph Curwen arrived in free-thinking Providence from Salem in June of 1692 and rapidly built a lucrative shipping business and a solid bourgeois identity. However, as rumors spread of his strange practices – “chymical” experimentation late into the night, frequenting of graveyards, importation of cattle and slaves that vanished without being sold, purchase of curious volumes from Amsterdam and the Levant, strange voices and howls heard from his Pawtuxet farmstead – he became almost a recluse. Those who did see him maintained that Curwen never aged, and a 1746 diary entry by one John Merritt confirms that Curwen owned a copy of the Necronomicon.

  This is an early (1782?) version of the portrait of Commodore Abraham Whipple (1733–1819) by Edward Savage (1761–1817). Savage sketched Whipple, and apparently heard more details of the captain’s later anti-Mythos expeditions, during the siege of Charleston in 1780. Whipple encountered and escaped the creature Savage depicts as a kraken during his 1776 raid on New Providence in the Bahamas. After 1784, Whipple retired inland to a life of farming. (PD)

  Curwen intended his 1763 marriage to Eliza Tillinghast to provide social cover and a way back into Providence civic life. Instead it provided him a deadly enemy in the person of Eliza’s jilted lover Ezra Weeden, who began a jealous surveillance of Curwen’s activities. When the British customs schooner HMS Cygnet captured the scow Fortaleza in January 1770 and discovered a cargo of Egyptian mummies, Weeden used the scandal to interest a vigilance committee of Providence’s leading citizens, among them the ex-governor Stephen Hopkins, the astronomer
Benjamin West, and the privateer captain Abraham Whipple. The committee intercepted Curwen’s mail, uncovering correspondence with one Jedediah Orne of Salem, a William van der Heyl of Chorazin, New York, and an unnamed savant in Philadelphia.

  After a year of further surveillance and deliberation, the discovery of a naked man drowned in the creek near Curwen’s farm – apparently the blacksmith Daniel Green, who had died almost 50 years earlier in 1721 – moved the committee to action. A detachment of 100 men from the Providence militia under Captain Whipple raided Curwen’s Pawtuxet farm and the underlying caverns, firing upon the few men loyal to Curwen at the farm and setting fire to the outbuildings. They used black-powder charges to collapse the tunnels, eventually capturing and killing Curwen himself. As they did, a red mist rose over the farm, blotting out the stars. A contemporary letter describes “an intolerable stench” followed by a “clutching, amorphous fear.” Then “came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue.”

  Captain Esek Hopkins (1718– 1802) joined the Curwen raiders at the last minute, commanding the party that closed and explored the tunnels under Pawtuxet. This experience may have deranged him slightly: Congress relieved him of his command in 1778 for disobedience (or excessive initiative) and over his practice of torturing British prisoners to gain information. (Classic Imag / Alamy)

  Governor Hopkins’ correspondent Paul Revere led a similar raid on the Orne house in Salem the same night, but their target had decamped the night before. Hopkins had no useful contacts in the distant wilds of upstate New York, but in May 1780, George Washington (possibly alerted by Hopkins) ordered the semi-invalided Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Burr to take a company of men and root out Van der Heyl from Chorazin. Burr and Washington never recorded the results of the action, but during the day of May 19, a profound darkness blanketed the region from Maine to New Jersey. City buildings in Providence could not be seen at noon without the aid of candles. The unnatural darkness lasted more than 24 hours, ending with a rain of sulfurous ash and cinders that fell in some places to a depth of 6in.

  The Web-Footed Regiment

  Whether because the trials had truly rooted out the witch-cult, or because the witch-cult had learned better security, spiritual threats dominated the colonial imagination less in the mid-18th century. With the threat from France and her Native allies followed by a British crown determined to quash colonial self-government, Patriot elites ignored or even recruited those whom their Puritan forefathers had condemned. By 1759, volunteer regiments from across New England had been raised to press the interests of the British crown in North America, with men from Marblehead, Kingsport, Salem, and Arkham serving with distinction in numerous land campaigns.

  Colonel John Glover’s famous 14th Continental “Amphibian” Regiment, officially based out of Marblehead, was made up of just these sorts of men: fishermen, traders, free African-Americans, Wampanoag and other Natives, and Miskatonic Valley farmers. Glover’s “web-foots” were instrumental in securing the evacuation of the untested Continental Army – and George Washington himself – from Long Island in July 1776 to avoid a British siege, silently ferrying men, horses, equipment, and supplies across the East River. Particularly wide-eyed accounts of the evacuation credit the sudden thick fog that provided cover for the Continental escape to the strange shanties manned by a few “frog-eyed men of Innsmouth,” or in one case to an “artifice” by Colonel Israel Hutchinson of Salem, commander of the 27th Massachusetts. Glover and Hutchinson’s regiments also crewed the boats in which Washington crossed the Delaware during the Trenton–Princeton campaign, but the Innsmouth and Kingsport men mostly mustered out in early 1777, disliking the prejudicial attitudes of the regular soldiers.

  One Kingsport veteran of Glover’s regiment, Richard Holt, served in the Barbary Wars. Captured aboard the USS Philadelphia by “Moorish witchcrafts,” he spent the bulk of his captivity enslaved to one of the Pasha’s pet sorcerers. Upon his release in 1805, Holt returned to Kingsport and built a house on Water Street near the sea. Holt reappears in the correspondence of Glover’s political patron Elbridge Gerry in 1813 and 1814; Vice-President Gerry repeatedly and inexplicably attempted to once more recruit the 60-year-old Holt into the US Navy. He was apparently unsuccessful, although he penned an effusive letter of thanks to Holt on August 26, 1814, the day after a sudden hurricane and tornado drove British forces out of Washington.

  At 10.00pm on April 12, 1771, approximately 100 men of the Providence militia gathered at the Golden Lion Inn on Weybosset Point near Pawtuxet, Rhode Island, and at midnight staged to the nearby Fenner farm. Their leader, the shipping magnate (and future Congressman) John Brown (1736–1803) told the Fenners the militia were moving against a British informant damaging the local smuggling trade: their target was in fact the farm next door, belonging to the necromancer Joseph Curwen. The vigilance committee divided its forces into three: 20 men under the sailor Eleazar Smith to guard the farm’s dock against surprise reinforcements, 20 men under Captain Esek Hopkins (1718–1802) to break into and guard a tunnel from the farm to the river valley, and the remaining 60 under Captain Abraham Whipple (1733–1819) to assault the farm itself. Whipple led 20 men against the farmhouse, Captain James Mathewson (1739–80) led 20 against a stone outbuilding, and Brown commanded the reserve encircling the farm. Whipple, Mathewson, and Hopkins launched their assault shortly after 1.00am. Eight of the raiders died in the affray, as did Curwen and his two servants.

  Here, Mathewson’s company breaks down the door to the stone outbuilding after Whipple’s first whistle blast signals the assault. (A second blast signaled the advance after entry was secured.) Mathewson holds a cutlass and pistol; the man holding the book is the Baptist Reverend James Manning (1738–1791), first president of Brown University. According to the diary of Eleazar Smith, Manning accompanied Mathewson’s detachment and emerged “badly disturbed.” Surviving correspondence from the Fenner family mentions the “shaft of green light” that emerged from the stone building during Curwen’s operations and shone with particular lividity on the night of the attack.

  THREAT REPORT: GHOULS

  “There was vaguely anthropoid structure, all right; and the blood corpuscles were almost human – quite shockingly so. But the head and the spade-like appendages and the muscular developments were quite unlike any beast or man on this earth.”

  –Inspector Gordon Craig, Special Subway Detail, New York Police Department

  For all their horrifying habits and strange abilities, the creatures colloquially known as Ghouls are perhaps the least alien of the catalogued and recognized NREs, and perhaps also the youngest. There is no archaeological (or paleontological) evidence of Ghoul populations until well into the Holocene, though their general absence from the fossil record cannot be taken as conclusive: these voracious creatures consume their own dead. The beasts leave no buildings or monuments, and while intelligent enough to read and write, they have no written records (nor indeed, any written language) of their own.

  Ghouls do have a globally shared spoken language, primarily made up of gibbers, meeps, and howls. Those whose habitats abut human settlements have proven capable of learning – and speaking – the human languages of the regions they inhabit. Despite the relative lack of advanced cultural structures, Ghoul social groups share remarkably consistent religious structures, almost universally revering a nameless “charnel god” which, based on limited observation of Ghoul religious rites, is likely the echo of (or the origin for) the child sacrifice-demanding Canaanite-Punic god Moloch.

  Roughly equivalent to humans in size, shape, and proportion, Ghouls are facultative bipeds – able to walk or run on four limbs as easily as two. They have small noses set back on a dog-like snout filled with sharp, rending teeth. Most have
gray or greenish skin, long, clawed fingers on thick, spade-shaped hands uniquely suited to rapid digging or burrowing, and muscular legs ending in long feet with bony outgrowths that in some cases resemble hooves. Muscle tissue is thin and ropelike but unusually dense, giving the creatures greater strength and stamina than a human of similar size. Ghouls are mortal but long-lived, typically living well into their second century, but can be killed by gunfire of sufficient volume and caliber.

  The prevailing theory among MAJIC xenobiologists is that Ghouls are, in fact, a symbiosis between a human being and an aggressive, viral (or prion-based) infection. Following extended or frequent contact with Ghouls, particularly in their own warrens, humans manifest Ghoul traits (both physical and neurological) and, with continued exposure, can completely metamorphose into the Ghoul state. In rare cases, humans and Ghouls have produced viable offspring, although the extant legendry surrounding them more often describes human cults trading “changeling” children with Ghouls.

  Ghouls live and travel in packs ranging in size from eight to approximately 60, with multiple packs sometimes gathering to form larger (and often temporary) cooperative social groups near particularly plentiful food sources. Carrion eaters that almost always prefer to feed on human flesh, Ghouls have been observed hunting live prey in rare cases. Long-settled cities with plentiful supplies of human dead have the largest Ghoul warrens in the United States: elaborate networks of caves and tunnels, sometimes dug into solid rock, typically leading to and from graveyards or catacombs. Major warrens exist beneath Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Detroit. No census or even estimate of the Ghoul population in the United States exists.