to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled
beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and
a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind
shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the
pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward
the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his
nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades
of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed
by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to
worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before
D ’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before
even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was
nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men
dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present
voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more
than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard
by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black
morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There
are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities pe
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culiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the
source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated
through .those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from
the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation
would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of
hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous
phrase or ritual:
"P h ’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R ’tyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. ”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were
thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four
of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised
with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of
perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On
this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of
human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could
paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the
curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight
feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the
flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the
oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion
being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring
of bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been
only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable
Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual
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from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood
of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez,
I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng,
the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly
into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and
chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots
were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse
was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom
he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two
rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and
two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised
stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and
weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low,
mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands,
gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But
before many questions were asked, it became manifest that
something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their
loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who
lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the
young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now,
inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had
told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a
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cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house
in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the water, should rise and
bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would
call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would
always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which
even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely
alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came
out of the dark to visit the Mthful few. But these were not
the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones.
The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say
whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one
could read the old writing now, but things were told by word
of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was
never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only
this: “ In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be
hanged, and the rest were committed to various
institutions.
All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the
killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come
to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted
wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account
could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came
mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who
claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled
the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world
seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when
other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great
cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had
told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when
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the stars had come round again to the right positions in the
cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from
the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was
not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could
plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the
stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no
longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in
stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the
spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the
stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But
at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate
Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise
prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could
only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted
thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after
infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones
spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams;
for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of
mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult
around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols
brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never
die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would
take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and
resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know,
for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones;
free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves,
and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and
freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep
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alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the
prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed
Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The
great stone city R ’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres,
had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, hill of the
one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass,
had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died,
and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the
stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits
of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours
picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of
them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off
hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit
more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he
curiously declined to mention. O f the cult, he said that he
thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia,
where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had
ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said
that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the
mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as
they chose, especially the must-discussed couplet:
“ That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered,
had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the
cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that
it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University
could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the
detective had come to the highest authorities in the country
and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor
Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s
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tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the
subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although
scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it
was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I
viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did
not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after
a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a
sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure
and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the
Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at
least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike
by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor
Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect
way, and of having invested a series of dreams to heighten
and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-
narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of
course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind
and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt
what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of
Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and
give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing
upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in
Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-
century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front
amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and
under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in
America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once
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conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius
is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some
time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has
crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those
nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in
prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in
painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned
languidly at my knock and asked me my business without
rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the
study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but
sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I
became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of
the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their
subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and
he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made
me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could
not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his
own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves
insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape
he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of
the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received
the weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was
all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fh ta g n ,’’ “Cthulhu fhtagn. ” These words had formed part
of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil
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