He became almost rational; he must count the dead. One
upstairs, five here. One, two, three, four, five heaps. That
was correct: all present and accounted for, Frank boy, Pun-
kinhead Frank, Crazy Frank: all dead and accounted for. Had
he thought that thought before? Had he taken that mock roll
before? Had he wrought this slaughter twice over, twice in
this same old room?
But where were Mama and the little girls? They mustn’t
see this blood-splashed inferno of a parlor. He was looking
at himself in the tall mirror, and he saw a bear-man loathsome with his own blood and others’ blood. He looked like the Wild Man of Borneo. In abhorrence he flung his axe
aside. Behind him sprawled the reflections of the hacked dead.
Fighting down his heart pain, he reeled into the hall. ‘‘Little girls! Mrs. Anthony! Allegra, oh, Allegra!” His voice was less strong. ‘‘Where are you? It’s safe now!”
They did not call back. He labored up the main stair,
clutching his side. “ Allegra, speak to your Frank!” They
were in none of the bedrooms.
He went up the garret stair, then, whatever the agony, and
beyond Frank’s Room to the cupola stair, and ascended that
slowly, gasping hard. They were not in the cupola. Might they
have run out among the trees? In that cold dawn, he stared on
every side; he thought his sight was beginning to fail.
He could see no one outside the house. The drifts still choked
the street beyond the gateposts, and those two boulders protruded impassive from untrodden snow. Back down the flights of stairs he made his way, clutching at the rail, at the wall.
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125
Surely the little gills hadn’t strayed into that parlor butcher-
shop? He bit his lip and peered into the Sunday parlor.
The bodies all were gone. The splashes and ropy strands of
blood all were gone. Everything stood in perfect order, as if
violence never had touched Tamarack House. The sun was rising, and sunlight filtered through the shutters. Within fifteen minutes, the trophies of his savage victory had disappeared.
It was like the recurrent dream which had tormented Frank
when he was little: he separated from Mother in the dark,
wandering solitary in empty lanes, no soul alive in all the
universe but little Frank. Yet those tremendous axe blows had
severed living flesh and blood, and for one moment, there
on the stairs, he had held in his arms a tiny quick Allegra;
of that reality he did not doubt at all.
Wonder subduing pain, he staggered to the front door. It
stood unshattered. He drew the bar and turned the key, and went
down the stone steps into the snow. He was weak now, and did
not know where he was going. Had he done a Signal Act? Might
the Lord give him one parting glimpse of little Allegra, somewhere among these trees? He slipped in a drift, half rose, sank again, crawled. He found himself at the foot of one of those
boulders—the farther one, the stone he had not inspected.
The snow had fallen away from the face of the bronze
tablet. Clutching the boulder, Frank drew himself up. By
bringing his eyes very close to the tablet, he could read the
words, a dying man panting against deathless bronze:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
FRANK
A SPIRIT IN PRISON, MADE FOR ETERNITY
WHO SAVED US AND DIED FOR US
JANUARY 1 4 , I 915
“ Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcass crippled to abide?”
H. P. Lovecraft
The Call or Cthulhu
Between Poe and King, the great American master of
horror is H. P. Lovecraft. As a critic, his Supernatural
Horror in Literature is the most important essay on horror literature. His influence as mentor and correspondent on his generation was overwhelming and is still felt. His
emphasis on cosmic scale, his New England antiquari-
anism and his elevated and florid style, his consistent
juxtaposition of the supernatural to the rational, combined to make him a literary outcast in his day. But his reputation has grown steadily in France (as did Poe’s)
and, in spite of Edmund Wilson's attempt to dispose of
him once and for all in the 1940s, persists in the U.S.
Lovecraft rejected conventional morality and the supernatural and yearned to have been born in the eighteenth century a rationalist. But “The Call of Cthulhu” is about
a cosmic evil that waits to overcome us with “ 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.” Psychologically interesting, but not
about the psychological life of characters, concerned
with the nature of reality, but with no doubt as to its
nature, “The Call of Cthulhu” is about "some things man
was not meant to know." Lovecraft was the giant of the
pulp horror story and Weird Tales was the magazine
where much of his work found a home, along with the
stories of his friends and correspondents such as Clark
Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard,
throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The influence of the
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The Call o f Cthulhu
127
“ Lovecraft circle” was dominant until the 1940s and remained strong in Weird Tales until its demise in the 1950s.
(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, 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 Blackwood
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.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the
cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form tran
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H. P. Lovecraft
sient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms
which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of
it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all
dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dea
d professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live,
I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain.
I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-
27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell An-
gell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown
University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was
widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and
had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent
museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may
be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the
obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been
stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer
dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short
cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams
Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder,
but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the
time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly
I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of
files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the ma
The Call o f Cthulhu
129
terial which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much adverse
from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did
not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal
ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then
indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed
only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked
barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-
relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings
which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become
credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to
search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent
disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick
and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modem
origin. Its designs, however, were far from modem in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce
that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And
writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any
way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its
remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort
of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form
which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled
head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a
vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.
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H. P. Lovecraft
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a
stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent
hand; and made no pretence to literary style. What seemed
to be the main document was headed “ CTHULHU CULT”
in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous
reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed
“ 1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas
St., Providence, R .I.,” and the second, “ Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s
Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes,
some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical bools and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost
Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret
societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such
mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s
Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outr6 mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon
Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which
was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name
of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him
as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to
him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode
Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys
Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth
of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself
“ psychically hypersensitive,” but the staid folk of the ancient
commercial city dismissed him as merely “ queer.” Never
mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from
The Call o f Cthulhu
131
social visibility, and was now known only to a small group
of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club,
anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite
hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on
the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which
suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed
some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of
the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology.
Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough
to make him recall and record it veibatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, “ It is new, indeed, for I made it last night
in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly
played upon a sleeping memo
ry and won the fevered interest
of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the
night before, the most considerable felt in New England for
some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent honor. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and
from some undetermined point below had come a voice that
was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could
transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by
the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu
fhtagn. ”
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which
excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the
sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost
frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found
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H. P. Lovecraft
himself working, chilled and clad only in his nightclothes,
when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness
in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many
of his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor,
especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange
cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical
or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became
convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult
or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls
of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a
subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in
enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish.
The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered
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