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A Dark Lore
An Essential
Call Of Cthulhu
Primer
Stories to help you understand the background of
Call Of Cthulhu
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
1890 – 1937
The Call of Cthulhu
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Summer 1926
Published February 1928 in
Weird Tales
, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 159-78, 287.
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long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity...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 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 transient 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 eons 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 dead 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 intented 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 great-
uncle, George Gammell Angell, 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 great-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 material 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 averse from showing 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 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 modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern 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 the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any
way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident 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 suggestions of a Cyclopean
architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in
Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense 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 brief notes, some of
them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from
theosophical books 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 outré mental illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of
1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular 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
recognized 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 chidhood 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 social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from other
towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found
him quite hopeless.
On the ocassion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked
for the benefit of his host's archeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of
the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous
freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archeology. Young Wilcox's
rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim,
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
memory 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 horror. 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 frantic
intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad
only in his night clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
blamed his old age, Wilcox afterwards said, for his slowness in recognizing 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 imaginery 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 frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters
"Cthulhu"
and
"R'lyeh."
On March 23, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his
quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the
home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several
other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of
unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that
time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr.
Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was
dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them.
They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly
on a gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or lumbered about.
He at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr.
Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he
had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added,
was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His temperature,
oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such
as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2 at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly ceased. He sat
upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had
happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22. Pronounced well by his
physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no
further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my
uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant
accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes
gave me much material for thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained skepticism
then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes
in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same
period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems,
had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the
friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their
dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his
request seems to have varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses
than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original
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