Collected Fiction Volume 3 (1931-1936): A Variorum Edition

by H. P. Lovecraft

  I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent’s victim may look at his destroyer’s eyes and fangs.[882] Then, with clumsy fingers[883] in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curious[884] hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—if the whole abyss truly existed—if I, and the world itself, truly existed.

  Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes[885] to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world—that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground.[886] Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving[887] abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward journey.

  I dreaded having to re-pass[888] through that black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts[889] welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weak and dying—down there. I thought of those possible[890] five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks,[891] wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene[892] ruins was dwelt upon.

  I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last—after passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space with the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable,[893] was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris[894] and fragments of every sort.

  Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris[895] through which I had wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite;[896] for my first passage had made some noise, and I now—after seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice.[897] But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself—my back torn as before by stalactites.[898] As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris,[899] making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.

  That din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth,[900] and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only my imagination.[901] If so, what followed has a certain[902] grim irony—since,[903] save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.

  As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight[904] which lay so far above.[905] I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris[906] which towered into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments.[907] Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black[908] cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking[909] reverberations.

  I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness shews[910] me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour[911]—case and torch still with me.[912] Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful,[913] alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.

  Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the[914] hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things,[915] and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely a cool, damp draught,[916] but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.

  There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath.[917] Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface.[918] I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors[919] must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake.[920] Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.

  I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross,[921] yet was too racked by other fears to realise[922] the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon[923] wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.

  My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me[924]—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.

  Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and[925] ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris[926] as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniac[927] vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.

  That is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real.[928] There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth[929] and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless[930] basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.

  Secrets of the primal planet and its immem
orial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my[931] former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour[932] clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.

  Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean[933] city of my dreams—not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human[934] body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines.[935] Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful[936] momentary flashes of a non-visual[937] consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like[938] flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.

  Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight[939]—a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight[940] through a jumble of debris[941] which slid and collapsed after me amidst[942] a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight[943] which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.

  I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches.[944] Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious dream[945] began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real?[946] My flashlight was gone, and likewise any[947] metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.[948]

  The daemon[949] wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon[950] sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt[951] all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.

  Had I, in full[952] hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human[953] world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean[954] gulfs of time?[955] Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories?[956] Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets[957] past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder Things[958] of the mad winds and daemon[959] pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?

  I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But[960] mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene[961] corridors have not been found.[962] If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.

  I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean[963] buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally[964] to set down the[965] crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course[966] it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries.[967] No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic[968] abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented[969] letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s[970] youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language[971] in my own handwriting.

  ditor’s Note: The restoration of the text of this story became considerably easier with the unexpected discovery of HPL’s original A.Ms. in 1994. I prepared the first corrected edition (Hippocampus Press, 2001), and that edition contains an essay by John H. Stanley recounting the discovery of the A.Ms. The story was surreptitiously typed by R. H. Barlow during HPL’s visit with him in Florida in the summer of 1935. (A fragmentary A.Ms., long held by JHL, appears to be a fair copy of one page of the original A.Ms., perhaps because Barlow was unable to read this page adequately.) Barlow’s T.Ms. (non-extant) was probably quite inaccurate in spots, and HPL does not seem to have corrected it very carefully, if at all, before it was submitted (by Donald Wandrei) to Astounding Stories, where it appeared in the June 1936 issue.

  HPL inexplicably declared to many correspondents that the text was not tampered with in the same manner as was At the Mountains of Madness, but it is clear that the same kind of editorial alterations—changes in punctuation and especially the breaking up of HPL’s long paragraphs into shorter ones—have occurred here, although no actual cuts were made. HPL did prepare a hand-corrected copy of the Astounding issue containing the story, but he corrected only a few obvious errors and none of the paragraphing changes (he clearly did not have the A.Ms. at hand while doing so, since he had presented it as a gift to Barlow). There will always be uncertainty whether a given variant between the A.Ms. and the Astounding appearance is a result of Barlow’s error in the T.Ms. or a change by the Astounding editors, but the matter is largely academic. The Arkham House text appears to have been based on HPL’s corrected copy of Astounding, since it restores a phrase at one point in the text (429.7) where Astounding erroneously printed a line of text from another passage.

  Texts: A = A.Ms. (JHL); A2 = fragmentary A.Ms. (JHL); B = Astounding Stories 17, No. 4 (June 1936): 110–54; Bc = HPL’s corrected copy of Astounding issue (JHL); C = The Dunwich Horror and Others (Arkham House, 1963), 370–431. Copy-text: A.

  Notes

  1. twenty-two] 22 A

  2. impossible.] impossible. ¶ B, C

  3. paralysing.] paralyzing. B, C

  4. specific] specific, B, C

  5. it.] it. ¶ B, C

  6. all] all the B, C

  7. evidence.] evidence. ¶ B, C

  8. definitive] definite C

  9. Prof.] Professor B, C

  10. night.] night. ¶ B, C

  11. re-reading] rereading B, C

  12. convey.] convey. ¶ B, C

  13. as] anything that B, C

  14. shewing] showing B, C

  15. to] in B, C

  16. lurk] lurked B, C

  17. sources.] sources. ¶ B, C

  18. at the age . . . Miskatonic] om. B, C

  19. Instructor . . . Economy
] instructor of political economy C

  20. 1895.] 1895. ¶ B, C

  21. K.] om. B, C

  22. Wingate,] Wingate B, C

  23. Hannah,] Hannah B, C

  24. realised] realized B, C

  25. someone] some one B, C

  26. a.m.,] a. m., B, C

  27. classroom.] classroom. ¶ B, C

  28. unconscious] unconscious, B, C

  29. shewed] showed B, C

  30. Street] St. A; Street, B, C

  31. attention.] attention. ¶ B, C

  32. a.m.] a. m. B, C

  33. 15] 15th B, C

  34. doctors] doctor C

  35. or of] and B, C

  36. flexions] flections Bc, C

  37. archaism] Archaism Bc

  38. cast.] cast. ¶ B, C

  39. latter] latter, B, C

  40. re-education] re-/education B; reeducation C

  41. care.] care. ¶ B, C

  42. thing.] thing. ¶ B, C

  43. outside] outside of C

  44. fright.] fright. ¶ B, C

  45. traveller] traveler B, C

  46. universities,] Universities, Bc, C

  47. years.] years. ¶ B, C

  48. symptom] symptoms C

  49. everyone] every one B, C

  50. persistent.] persistent. ¶ B, C

  51. me] me, Bc

  52. normalcy] normality B, C

  53. son Wingate] son, Wingate, B, C

  54. today] to-day, B; today, C

  55. thirty-five] 35 A; thirty-five, B, C

  56. Miskatonic.] Miskatonic. ¶ B, C

  57. awaked] awakened C

  58. 1908] 1908, B, C

  59. journals.] journals. ¶ B, C

  60. slowly] slowly, C

  61. centres] centers B, C

  62. the extreme;] the extreme, B; extreme, C

  63. places.] places. ¶ B, C

  64. learn.] learn. ¶ B, C

  65. arctic] Arctic A; arctic, B; Arctic, C

  66. shewing] showing A, B, C