to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the
faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration.
All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon
saw enough!
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
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myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the
cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons,
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 real-
ity.
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.
The Call o f Cthulhu
157
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 geometery 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 phantasqially variable.
Briden pushed at die 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, for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-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
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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 vigintillions 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 Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging ffenziedly 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 chum 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
The Call o f Cthulhu
159
pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Bri-
den 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 stem of a daemon
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 cachinnating 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
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H. P. Lovecraft
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.
Shirley Jackson
The S ummer People
A significant portion of the major work of Shirley Jack-
son is horror fiction. Aside from her novels, The Sundial.
The Haunting of Hill House and the National Book Award
winner, W e Have Always Lived in the Castle, much of
her short fiction is particularly fine horror. She chose to
work often in the specialized area of the house story, of
which The Haunting of Hill House is perhaps the most
perfect example yet written. She told me in conversation
in 1962 that she had a complete run of Unknown magazine. "It's the best," she said. Her influence on horror in the novel form continues to grow in the two decades
since her death. Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, featured The Haunting of Hill House as one of his ten best since World W ar II. “The Summer People” is another of
Jackson's house stories. Mr. and Mrs. Allison have broken a rule and will be punished. This tale is an interesting comparison to Lucy Clifford's “The New Mother." Here,
however, the irony is overt, since we have the form of
the moral tale without the morality at all.
The Allisons’ country cottage, seven miles from the nearest town, was set prettily on a hill; from three sides it looked down on soft trees and grass that seldom, even at
midsummer, lay still and dry. On the fourth side was the
161
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Shirley Jackson
lake, which touched against the wooden pier the Allisons had
to keep repairing, and which looked equally well from the
Allisons’ front porch, their side porch or any spot on the
wooden staircase leading from the porch down to the water.
Although the Allisons loved their summer cottage, looked
forward to arriving in the early summer and hated to leave in
the fall, they had not troubled themselves to put in any improvements, regarding the cottage itself and die lake as improvement enough for the life left to them. The cottage had no heat, no running water except the precarious supply from
the backyard pump and no electricity. For seventeen summers, Janet Allison had cooked on a kerosene stove, heating all their water; Robert Allison had brought buckets full of
water daily from the pump and read his paper by kerosene
light in the evenings and they had both, sanitary city people,
become stolid and matter-of-fact about their backhouse. In
the first two years they had gone through all the standard
vaudeville and magazine jokes about backhouses and by now,
when they no longer had frequent guests to impress, they had
subsided to a comfortable security which made the backhouse, as well as the pump and the kerosene, an indefinable asset to their summer life.
In themselves, the Allisons were ordinary people. Mrs.
Allison was fifty-eight years old and Mr. Allison sixty; they
had seen their children outgrow the summer cottage and go
on to families of their own and seashore resorts; their friends
were either dead or settled in comfortable year-round houses,
their nieces and nephews vague. In the winter they told one
another they could stand their New York apartment while
waiting for the summer; in the summer they told one another
that the winter was well worth while, waiting to get to the
country.
Since they were old enough not to be ashamed of regular
habits, the Allisons invariably left their summer cottage the
&nb
sp; Tuesday after Labor Day, and were as invariably sorry when
the months of September and early October turned out to be
pleasant and almost insufferably barren in the city; each year
The Summer People
163
they recognized that there was nothing to bring them back to
New York, but it was not until this year that they overcame
their traditional inertia enough to decide to stay at the cottage
after Labor Day.
“ There isn’t really anything to take us back to the city,”
Mrs. Allison told her husband seriously, as though it were a
new idea, and he told her, as though neither of them had ever
considered it, “ We might as well enjoy the country as long
as possible.”
Consequently, with much pleasure and a slight feeling of
adventure, Mrs. Allison went into their village the day after
Labor Day and told those natives with whom she had dealings, with a pretty air of breaking away from tradition, that she and her husband had decided to stay at least a month
longer at their cottage.
“ It isn’t as though we had anything to take us back to the
city,” she said to Mr. Babcock, her grocer. “ We might as
well enjoy the country while we can.”
“ Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before,”
Mr. Babcock said. He was putting Mrs. Allison’s groceries
into a large cardboard carton, and he stopped for a minute to
look reflectively into a bag of cookies. “ Nobody,” he added.
“ But the city!” Mrs. Allison always spoke of the city to
Mr. Babcock as though it were Mr. Babcock’s dream to go
there. “ It’s so hot—you’ve really no idea. We’re always sorry
when we leave.”
“ Hate to leave,” Mr. Babcock said. One of the most irritating native tricks Mrs. Allison had noticed was that of taking a trivial statement and rephrasing it downwards, into
an even more trite statement. “ I ’d hate to leave myself,” Mr.
Babcock said, after deliberation, and both he and Mrs. Allison smiled. “ But I never heard of anyone ever staying out at the lake after Labor Day before.”
“ Well, we’re going to give it a try,” Mrs. Allison said,
and Mr. Babcock replied gravely, “ Never know till you try.”
Physically, Mrs. Allison decided, as she always did when
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