ACTUALLY, IT BEGAN a long time ago: how long, I have not dared to guess: but so far as he is concerned my own connection with the case that has ruined my practice and earned me the dubiety of the medical profession in regard to my sanity, it began with Amos Tuttle’s death. That was on a night in late winter, with a south wind blowing on the edge of spring. I had been in ancient, legend-haunted Arkham that day; he had learned of my presence there from Doctor Ephraim Sprague, who attended him, and had the doctor call the Lewiston House and bring me to that gloomy estate on the Aylesbury Road near the Innsmouth Turnpike. It was not a place to which I liked to go, but the old man had paid me well to tolerate his sullenness and eccentricity, and Sprague made it clear that he was dying: a matter of hours.
And he was. He had hardly the strength to motion Sprague from the room and talk to me, though his voice came clearly enough and with little effort.
“You know my will,” he said. “Stand by it to the letter.”
That will had been a bone of contention between us because of its provision that before his heir and sole surviving nephew, Paul Tuttle, could claim his estate, the house would have to be destroyed—not taken down, but destroyed, together with certain books designated by shelf number in his final instructions. His death-bed was no place to debate this wanton destruction anew; I nodded, and he accepted that. Would to heaven I had obeyed without question!
“Now then,” he went on, “there’s a book downstairs you must take back to the library of Miskatonic University.”
He gave me the title. At that time it meant little to me; but it has since come to mean more than I can say—a symbol of age-old horror, of maddening things beyond the thin veil of prosaic daily life—the Latin translation of the abhorred Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred.
I found the book easily enough. For the last two decades of his life Amos Tuttle had lived in increasing seclusion among books collected from all parts of the world: old, worm-eaten texts, with titles that might have frightened away a less hardened man—the sinister De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn, Comte d’Erlette’s terrible Cultes de Ghoules, von Junzt’s damnable Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I did not then know how rare these were, nor did I understand the priceless rarity of certain fragmentary pieces: the frightful Book of Eibon, the horror-fraught Pnakotic Manuscripts, and the dread R’lyeh Text; for these, I found upon examination of his accounts after Amos Tuttle’s death, he had paid a fabulous sum. But nowhere did I find so high a figure as that he had paid for the R’lyeh Text, which had come to him from somewhere in the dark interior of Asia; according to his files, he had paid for it no less than one hundred thousand dollars; but in addition to this, there was present in his account in regard to this yellowed manuscript a notation which puzzled me at the time, but which I was to have ominous cause to remember—after the sum above mentioned, Amos Tuttle had written in his spidery hand: in addition to the promise.
These facts did not come out until Paul Tuttle was in possession, but before that, several strange occurrences took place, things that should have aroused my suspicion in regard to the countryside legends of some powerful supernatural influence clinging to the old house. The first of these was of small consequence in view of the others; it was simply that upon returning the Necronomicon to the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham, I found myself conveyed by a tight-lipped librarian straightway to the office of the director, Doctor Llanfer, who asked me bluntly to account for the book’s being in my hands. I had no hesitation in doing so, and thereby discovered that the rare volume was never permitted out of the library, that, in fact, Amos Tuttle had abstracted it on one of his rare visits, having failed in his attempts to persuade Doctor Llanfer to permit his borrowing it. And Amos had been clever enough to prepare in advance a marvelously good imitation of the book, with a binding almost flawless in its resemblance, and the actual reproduction of title and opening pages of the text reproduced from his memory; upon the occasion of his handling the mad Arab’s book, he had substituted his dummy for the original and gone off with one of the two copies of this shunned work available on the North American continent, one of the five copies known to be in existence in the world.
The second of these things was a little more startling, though it bears the trappings of conventional haunted house stories. Both Paul Tuttle and I heard at odd times in the house at night, while his uncle’s corpse lay there particularly, the sound of padding footsteps, but there was a strangeness about them: they were not like footsteps falling within the house at all, but like the steps of some creature in size almost beyond the conception of man walking at a great distance underground, so that the sound actually vibrated into the house from the depths of earth below. And when I have reference to steps, it is only for lack of a better word to describe the sounds, for they were not flat steps at all, but like a kind of spongy, jelly-like, sloshing sound made with the force of so much weight behind them that the consequent shuddering of earth in that place was nothing more than this, and presently it was gone, ceasing, coincidentally enough, in the hours of the dawn when Amos Tuttle’s corpse was borne away forty-eight hours sooner than we had planned. The sounds we dismissed as settlings of the earth along the distant coast, not alone because we did not attach too great importance to them, but because of the final thing that took place before Paul Tuttle officially took possession of the old house on the Aylesbury Road.
This last thing was the most shocking of all, and of the three who knew it, only I now remain alive, Doctor Sprague being dead this day a month, though he took only one look and said, “Bury him at once!” And so we did, for the change in Amos Tuttle’s body was ghastly beyond conception, and especially horrible in its suggestion, and it was so because the body was not falling into any visible decay, but changing subtly in another way, becoming suffused with a weird iridescence, which darkened presently until it was almost ebon, and the appearance of on the flesh of his puffy hands and face of minute, scale-like growth. There was likewise some change about the shape of his head; it seemed to lengthen, to take on a curious kind of fish-like look, accompanied by a faint exudation of thick fish smell from the coffin; and that these changes were not purely imaginative was shockingly substantiated when the body was subsequently found in the place where its malignant after-dweller had conveyed it, and there, at last falling into putrefaction though it was, others saw with me the terrible, suggestive changes that had taken place, though they had mercifully no knowledge of what had gone before. But at the time when Amos Tuttle lay in the old house, there was no hint of what was to come, we were quick to close the coffin and quicker still to take it to the ivy-covered Tuttle vault in Arkham cemetery.
Paul Tuttle was at that time in his late forties, but, like so many men of his generation, he had the face and figure of a youth in his twenties. Indeed, the only hint of his age lay in the faint touches of gray in the hair of his moustache and temples. He was a tall, dark-haired man, slightly overweight, with frank blue eyes which years of scholarly research had not reduced to the necessity of glasses. Nor was he ignorant of law, for he quickly made known that if I, as his uncle’s executor, were not disposed to overlook the clause of his will that called for the destruction of the house on the Aylesbury Road, he would contest the will on the justifiable grounds of Amos Tuttle’s insanity. I pointed out to him that he stood alone against Doctor Sprague and me, but I was at the same time not blind to the fact that the unreasonableness of the request might very well defeat us; besides, I myself considered the clause in this regard amazingly wanton in the destruction it demanded, and was not prepared to fight a contest because of so minor a matter. Yet, I could have foreseen what was to come, could I have dreamed of the horror to follow, I would have carried out Amos Tuttle’s last request regardless of any decision of the court. However, such foresight was not mine.
We went to see Judge Wilton, Tuttle and I, and put the matter before him. He agreed with us that the destruction of the house seemed needless, and more than once hinted at concurrence with Paul Tuttle’s belief in his late uncle’s madness.
“The old man’s been touched for as long as I knew him,” he said dryly. “And as for you, Haddon, can you get up on a stand and swear that he was absolutely sane?”
Remembering with a certain uneasiness the theft of the Necronomicon from Miskatonic University, I had to confess that I could not.
So Paul Tuttle took possession of the estate on the Aylesbury road, and I went back to my legal practice in Boston, not dissatisfied with the way things had gone, and yet not without a lurking uneasiness difficult to define, an insidious feeling of impending tragedy, no little fed by my memory of what we had seen in Amos Tuttle’s coffin before we sealed and locked it away in the centuries-old vault in Arkham cemetery.
II
It was not for some time that I saw the gambrel roofs and Georgian balustrades of witch-cursed Arkham again, and then was there on business for a client who wished me to see to it that his property in ancient Innsmouth was protected from the Government agents and police who had taken possession of the shunned and haunted town, thought it was now some months since the mysterious dynamiting of blocks of the waterfront buildings and part of the terror—hung Devil Reef in the sea beyond—a mystery which has been carefully guarded and hidden since then, though I have learned of a paper purporting to give the true facts of the Innsmouth horror, a privately published manuscript written by a Providence author. It was impossible at that time to proceed to Innsmouth becaause Secret Service men had closed all roads; however, I made representations to the proper persons and received an assurance that my client’s property would be fully protected, since it lay well back from the waterfront; so I proceeded about other small town matters in Arkham.
I went to luncheon that day in a small restaurant near Miskatonic University, and while there, heard myself accosted in a familiar voice. I looked up and saw Doctor Llanfer, the university library’s director. He seemed somewhat upset, and betrayed his concern clearly in his features. I invited him to join me, but he declined; he did, however, sit down, somewhat on the chair’s edge.
“Have you been out to see Paul Tuttle?” he asked abruptly.
“I thought of going this afternoon,” I replied. “Is anything wrong?”
He flushed a little guiltily. “That I can’t say,” he answered precisely. “But there have been some nasty rumors loose in Arkham. And the Necronomicon is gone again.”
“Good Heaven! You’re surely not accusing Paul Tuttle of having taken it?” I exclaimed, half in surprise, half amused. “I could not imagine of what use it might be to him.”
“Still—he has it,” Doctor Llanfer persisted. “But I don’t think he stole it, and should not like to be understood as saying so. It is my opinion that one of our clerks gave it to him and is now reluctant to confess the enormity of his error. Be that as it may, the book has not come back, and I fear we shall have to go after it.”
“I could ask him about it,” I said.
“If you would, thank you,” responded Doctor Llanfer, a little eagerly. “I take it you’ve heard nothing of the rumors that are rife here?”
I shook my head.
“Very likely they are only the outgrowth of some imaginative mind,” he continued, but the air of him suggested that he was not willing or able to accept so prosaic an explanation. “It appears that passengers along the Aylesbury Road have heard strange sounds late at night, all apparently emanating from the Tuttle house.”
“What sounds?” I asked, not without immediate apprehension.
“Apparently those of footsteps; and yet, I understand no one will definitely say so, save for one young man who characterized them as soggy and said that they sounded as if something big were walking in mud and water near by.”
The strange sounds Paul Tuttle and I had heard on the night following Amos Tuttle’s death had passed from my mind, but at this mention of footsteps by Doctor Llanfer, the memory of what I had heard returned in full. I fear I gave myself slightly away, for Doctor Llanfer observed my sudden interest; fortunately, he chose to interpret it as evidence that I had indeed heard something of these rumors, my statement to the contrary notwithstanding. I did not choose to correct him in that regard, and at the same time I experienced a sudden desire to hear no more; so I did not press him for further details, and presently he rose to return to his duties, and left me with my promise to ask Paul Tuttle for the missing book still sounding in my ears.
His story, however slight it was, nevertheless sounded within me a note of alarm; I could not help recalling the numerous small things that held to memory—the steps we had heard, the odd clause in Amos Tuttle’s will, the awful metamorphosis in Amos Tuttle’s corpse. There was already then a faint suspicion in my mind that some sinister chain of events was becoming manifest here; my natural curiosity rose, though not without a certain feeling of distaste, a conscious desire to withdraw, and the recurrence of that strange, insidious conviction of impending tragedy. But I determined to see Paul Tuttle as early as possible.
My work in Arkham consumed the afternoon, and it was not until dusk that I found myself standing before the massive oaken door of the old Tuttle house on Aylesbury Road. My rather peremptory knock was answered by Paul himself, who
stood, lamp held high in hand, peering out into the growing night.
“Haddon!” he exclaimed, throwing the door wider. “Come in!”
That he was genuinely glad to see me I could not doubt, for the note of enthusiasm in his voice precluded any other supposition. The heartiness of his welcome also served to confirm me in my intention not to speak of the rumors I had heard, and to proceed about an inquiry after the Necronomicon at my own good time. I remembered that just prior to his uncle’s death, Tuttle had been working on a philosophical treatise relating to the growth of the Sac Indian language, and determined to inquire about this paper as if nothing else were of moment.
“You’ve had supper, I suppose,” said Tuttle, leading me down the hall and into the library.
I said that I had eaten in Arkham.
He put the lamp down upon a book-laden table, pushing some papers to one side as he did so. Inviting me to sit down, he resumed the seat he had evidently left to answer my knock. I saw now that he was somewhat disheveled, and that he had permitted his beard to grow. He had also taken on more weight, doubtless as a consequence of strictly enforced scholarship, with all its attendant confinement to the house and lack of physical exercise.
“How fares the Sac treatise?” I asked.
“I’ve put that aside,” he said shortly. “I may take it up later. For the present, I’ve struck something far more important—just how important I cannot yet say.”
I saw now that the books on the tables were not the usual scholarly tomes I had seen on his Ipswich desk, but with some faint apprehension observed that they were the books condemned by the explicit instructions if Tuttle’s uncle, as a glance at the vacant spaces on the proscribed shelves clearly corroborated.
Tuttle turned to me almost eagerly and lowered his voice as if in fear of being overheard. “As a matter of fact, Haddon, it’s colossal—a gigantic feat of the imagination; only for this: I’m no longer certain that it is imaginative, indeed, I’m not. I wondered about that clause in my uncle’s will; I couldn’t understand why he should want this house destroyed, and rightly surmised that the reason must lie somewhere in the pages of those books he so carefully condemned.” He waved a hand at the incunabula before him. “So I examined them, and I can tell you that I have discovered things of such incredible strangeness, such bizarre horror, that I hesitate sometimes to dig deeper into the mystery. Frankly, Haddon, it is the most outré matter I’ve ever come upon, and I must say it involved considerable research, quite apart from these books Uncle Amos collected.”
“Indeed,” I said dryly. “And I dare say you’ve had to do considerable travelling?”
He shook his head. “None at all, apart from one trip to Miskatonic University Library. The fact is, I found I could be served just as well by mail. You’ll remember those papers of my uncle’s? Well, I discovered among them that Uncle Amos paid a hundred thousand for a certain bound manuscript—bound in human skin, incidentally— together with a cryptic line: in addition to the promise. I began to ask myself what promise Uncle Amos could have made, and to whom; whether to the man or woman who had sold him this R’lyeh Text or to some other. I proceeded forthwith to search out the name of the man who had sold him the book, and presently found it with his address: some Chinese priest from inner Tibet: and wrote to him. His reply reached me a week ago.”
He bent away and rummaged briefly among the papers on his desk, until he found what he sought and handed it to me.
“I wrote in my uncle’s name not trusting entirely in the transaction, and wrote, moreover, as if I had forgotten or had a hope to avoid the promise,” he continued. “His reply is fully as cryptic as my uncle’s notation.”
Indeed, it was so, for the crumpled paper that was handed to me bore, in a strange, stilted script, byt one line, without signature or date: To afford a haven for Him Who is not to be Named.
I dare say I looked up at Tuttle with my wonderment clearly mirrored in my eyes, for he smiled before he replied.
“Means nothing to you, eh? No more did it to me, when I first saw it. But not for long. In order to understand what follows, you should know at least a brief outline of the mythology—if indeed it is only mythology—in which this mystery is rooted. My Uncle Amos apparently knew and believed all about it, for the various notes scattered in the margins of his proscribed books bespeak a knowledge far beyond mine. Apparently the mythology springs from a common source with our own legendary Genesis, but only by a very thin resemblance; sometimes I am tempted to say that this mythology is far older than any other—certainly in its implications it goes far beyond, being cosmic and ageless, for its beings are of two natures, and two only: the Old or Ancient Ones, the Elder Gods, of cosmic good, and those of cosmic evil, bearing many names, and themselves of different groups, as if associated with the elements and yet transcending them: for there are the Water Beings, hidden in the depths; those of Air that are the primal lurkers beyond time; those of Earth, horrible animate survivals of distant eons. Incredible time ago, the Old Ones banished from the cosmic places all the Evil Ones, imprisoning them in many places; but in time these Evil Ones spawned hellish minions who set about preparing for their return to greatness. The Old Ones are nameless, but their power is and will apparently always be great enough to check that of the others.
“Now, among the Evil Ones there is apparently often conflict, as among lesser beings. The Water Beings oppose those of Air; the Fire Beings oppose Earth Beings, but nevertheless, they together hate and fear the Elder Gods and hope always to defeat them in some future time. Among my Uncle Amos’s papers there are many fearsome names written in his crabbed script: Great Cthulhu, the Lake of Hali, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur the Unspeakable, Yuggoth, Aldones, Thale, Aldebaran, the Hyades, Carcosa and others; and it is possible to divide some of these names into vaguely suggestive classes from those notes which are explicable to me—though many present insoluble mysteries I cannot hope as yet to penetrate; and many, too, are written in a language I do not know, together with cryptic and oddly frightening symbols and signs. But through what I have learned, it is possible to know that Great Cthulhu is one of the Water Beings, even as Hastur is of the Beings that stalk the star-spaces; and it is possible to gather from vague hints in these forbidden books where some of these beings are. So I can believe that in this mythology, Great Cthulhu was banished to a place beneath the seas of Earth, while Hastur was hurled into outer space, into that place where the black stars hang, which is indicated as Aldebaran of the Hyades, which is the place mentioned by Chambers, even as he repeats the Carcosa of Bierce.
“Coming upon this communication from the priest in Tibet in the light of these things, surely one fact must come clearly forth: Haddon, surely, beyond the shadow of a doubt, He Who is not to be Named can be none other than Hastur the Unspeakable!”
The sudden cessation of his voice startled me; there was something hypnotic about his eager whisper, and something too that filled me with a conviction far beyond the power of Paul Tuttle’s words. Somewhere deep within the recesses of my mind, a chord had been struck, a mnemonic connection I could not dismiss or trace and which left me with a feeling as of limitless age, a cosmic bridge into another place and time.
“That seems logical,” I said at last, cautiously.
“Logical, Haddon, it is; it must be!” he exclaimed.
“Granting it,” I said, “what then?”
“Why, granting,” he went on quickly, “we have conceded that my Uncle Amos promised to make ready a haven in preparation for the return of Hastur from whatever region of outer space now imprisons him. Where that have is, or what manner of place it may be, has not thus far been my concern, though I can guess, perhaps. This is not the time for guessing, and yet it would seem, from certain other evidence at hand, that there may be some permissible deductions made. The first and most important of these is of a double nature—ergo, something unforeseen prevented the return of Hastur within my uncle’s lifetime, and yet some other being has made itself manifest.” Here he looked at me with unusual frankness and not a little nervousness. “As for the evidence of this manifestation, I would rather not at this time go into it. Suffice it to say that I believe I have such evidence at hand. I return to my original premise, then.
“Among the few marginal notations made by my uncle, there are two or three especially remarkable ones in the R’lyeh Text; indeed, in the light of what is known or can justifiably be guessed, they are sinister and ominous notes.”
So speaking, he opened the ancient manuscript and turned to a place quite close to the beginning of the narrative.
“Now attend me, Haddon,” he said, and I rose and bent over him to look at the spidery, almost illegible script that I knew for Amos Tuttle’s. “Observe the underscored line of text: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’ nagl fhtagn, and what follows it in my uncle’s unmistakable hand: His minions preparing the way, and he longer dreaming? (WT: 2/28) and at a more recent date, to judge by the shakiness of his hand, the single abbreviation: Inns! Obviously, this means nothing without a translation of the text. Failing this at the moment I first saw the note, I turned my attention to the parenthetical notation, and within a short while solved its meaning as a reference to a popular magazine, Weird Tales, for February, 1928. I have it here.”
He opened the magazine against the meaningless text, partially concealing the lines which had begun to take on an uncanny atmosphere of eldritch age beneath my eyes, and there beneath Paul Tuttle’s hand lay the first page of a story so obviously belonging to this unbelievable mythology that I could not repress a start of astonishment. The title, only partly covered by his hand, was The Call of Cthulhu, by H. P. Lovecraft. But Tuttle did not linger over the first page; he turned well into the heart of the story before he paused and presented to my gaze the identical unreadable line that lay beside the crabbed script of Amos Tuttle in the incredibly rare R’lyeh Text upon which the magazine reposed. And there, only a paragraph below, appeared what purported to be a translation of the utterly unknown language of the Text: In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
“There you have it,” resumed Tuttle with some satisfaction. “Cthulhu, too, waited for the time of his resurgence—how many eons, no one may know; but my uncle has questioned whether Cthulhu still lies dreaming, and following this, has written and doubly underscored an abbreviations which can only stand for Innsmouth! This, together with the ghastly things half hinted in this revealing story purporting to be only fiction, opens up a vista of undreamed horror, of age-old evil.”
“Good Heaven!” I exclaimed involuntarily. “Surely you can’t think this fantasy has come to life?”
Tuttle turned and gave me a strangely distant look. “What I think doesn’t matter, Haddon,” he replied gravely. “But there is one thing I would like very much to know— what happened at Innsmouth? What has happened there for decades past that people have shunned it so? Why has this once prosperous port sunk into oblivion, half its houses empty, its property practically worthless? And why was it necessary for Government men to blow up row after row of the waterfront dwellings and warehouses? Lastly, for what earthly reason did they send a submarine to torpedo the marine spaces beyond Devil Reef just out of Innsmouth?”
“I know nothing of that,” I replied.
But he paid no heed; his voice rose a little, uncertain and trembling, and he said, “I can tell you, Haddon. It is even as my Uncle Amos has written: Great Cthulhu has risen again!”
For a moment I was shaken; then I said, “But it is Hastur for whom he waited.”
“Precisely,” agreed Tuttle in a clipped, professional voice. “Then I should like to know who or what it is that walks the earth in the dark hours when Fomalhaut has risen and the Hyades are in the east!”
III
With this, he abruptly changed the subject; he began to ask me questions about myself and my practice, and presently, when I rose to go, he asked me to stay the night. This I consented finally, and with some reluctance, to do, whereupon he departed at once to make a room ready for me. I took the opportunity thus afforded to examine his desk more closely for the Necronomicon missing from the library of Miskatonic University. It was not on his desk, but, crossing to the shelves, I found it there. I had just taken it down and was examining it to make certain of its identity, when Tuttle reentered the room. His quick eyes darted to the book in my hands, and he half smiled.
“I wish you’d take that back to Doctor Llanfer when you go in the morning, Haddon,” he said casually. “Now that I’ve copied the text, I have no further use for it.”
“I’ll do that gladly,” I said, relieved that the matter could so easily be settled.
Shortly after, I retired to the room on the second floor which he had prepared for me. He accompanied me as far as the door, and there paused briefly, uncertain of speech ready for his tongue and yet not permitted to pass his lips; for he turned once or twice, bade me goodnight before he spoke what weighed upon his thoughts: “By the way—if you hear anything in the night, don’t be alarmed, Haddon. Whatever it is, it’s harmless—as yet.”
It was not until he had gone and I was alone in my room that the significance of what he had said and the way he had said it dawned upon me. It grew upon me then that this was confirmation of the wild rumors that had penetrated Arkham, and that Tuttle spoke not entirely without fear. I undressed slowly and thoughtfully, and got into the pajamas Tuttle had laid out for me, without deviating for an instant from the preoccupation with the weird mythology of Amos Tuttle’s ancient books that held my mind. Never quick to pass judgment, I was not prone to do so now; despite the apparent absurdity of the structure, it was still sufficiently well erected to merit more than a casual scrutiny. And it was clear to me that Tuttle was more than half convinced of its truth. This in itself was more than enough to give me pause, for Paul Tuttle had distinguished himself time and again for the thoroughness of his researches, and his published papers had not been challenged for even their most minor detail. As a result of facing these facts, I was prepared to admit at least that there was some basis for the mythology-structure outlined to me by Tuttle, but as to its truth or error, of course I was in position at that time to commit myself even within the confines of my own mind; for once a man concedes or condemns a thing within his mind, it is doubly, nay triply, difficult to rid himself of his own conclusion, however ill-advised it may subsequently prove to be.
Thinking thus, I got into bed, and lay there awaiting sleep. The night had deepened and darkened, though I could see through the flimsy curtain at the window that the stars were out, Andromeda high in the east, and the constellations of autumn beginning to mount the sky.
I was on the edge of sleep when I was startled awake again by a sound which had been present for some time, but which had only just then been borne in upon me with all its significance: the faintly trembling step of some gigantic creature vibrating all through the house, though the sound of it came not from within the house, but from the east, and for a confused moment I thought of something risen from the sea and walking along the shore in the wet sand.
But this illusion passed when I raised myself on one elbow and listened more intently. For a moment there was no sound whatever; then it came again, irregularly, broken—a step, a pause, two steps in fairly quick succession, an odd sucking noise. Disturbed, I got up and went to the open window. The night was warm, and the still air almost sultry; far to the northeast a beacon cut an arc upon the sky, and from the distant north came the faint drone of a night plane. It was already past midnight; low in the east shone red Aldebaran and the Pleiades, but I did not at that time, as I did later, connect the disturbances I heard to the appearance of the Hyades above the horizon.
The odd sounds, meanwhile, continued unabated, and it was borne in upon me presently that they were indeed approaching the house, however slow their progress. And that they came from the direction of the sea I could not doubt, for in this place there was no configurations of the earth that might have thrown any sound out of directional focus. I began to think again of those similar sounds we had heard while Amos Tuttle’s body lay in the house, though I did not then remember that even as the Hyades lay now low in the east, so they were then setting in the west. If there was any difference in the manner of their approach, I was not able to ascertain it, unless it was that the present disturbances seemed somehow closer, but it was not a physical closeness as much as a psychic closeness. The conviction of this was so strong that I began to feel a growing uneasiness not untinged with fear; I began to experience a wild restlessness, a desire for company; and I went quickly to the door of my room, opened it, and stepped quietly into the hall in search of my host.
But now at once a new discovery made itself known. As long as I had been in my room, the sounds I had heard seemed unquestionably to come from the east, notwithstanding the faint, almost intangible tremors that seemed to shudder through the old house; but here in the darkness of the hall, whither I had gone without a light of any kind, I became aware that the sounds and tremblings alike emanated from below—not, indeed, from any place in the house, but below that—rising as if from subterranean places. My nervous tension increased, and I stood uneasily to get my bearings in the dark, when I perceived from the direction of the stairway a faint radiance mounting from below. I moved toward it at once, noiselessly, and, looking over the banister, saw that the light came from an electric candle held in Paul Tuttle’s hand. He was standing in the lower hall, clad in his dressing-gown, though it was clear to me even from where I stood that he had not removed his clothes. The light that fell upon his face revealed the intensity of his attention; his head was cocked a little to one side in an attitude of listening, and he stood motionless the while I looked down upon him.
“Paul!” I called in a harsh whisper.
He looked up instantly and saw my face doubtless caught in the light from the candle in his hand. “Do you hear?” he asked.
“Yes—what in God’s name is it?”
“I’ve heard it before,” he said. “Come down.”
I went down to the lower hall, where I stood for a moment under his penetrating and questioning gaze.
“You aren’t afraid Haddon?”
I shook my head.
“Then come with me.”
He turned and led the way toward the back of the house, where he descended into the cellars below. All this time the sounds were rising in volume; it was as if they had approached closer to the house, indeed, almost as if they were directly below, and now there was obvious a definite trembling in the building, not alone of the walls and supports, but one with the shuddering and shaking of the earth all around: it was as if some deep subterranean disturbance had chosen this spot in the earth’s surface to make itself manifest. But Tuttle was unmoved by this, doubtless for the reason that he had experienced it before. He went directly through the first and second cellars to a third, set somewhat lower than the others, and apparently of more recent construction, but, like the first two, built of limestone blocks set in cement.
In the center of this sub-cellar he paused and stood quietly listening. The sounds had by this time risen to such intensity that it seemed as if the house were caught in a vortex of volcanic upheaval without actually suffering the destruction of its supports; for the trembling and shuddering, the creaking and groaning of the rafters above us gave evidence of the tremendous pressure exerted within the earth beneath us, and even the stone floor of the cellar seemed alive under my bare feet. But presently these sounds appeared to recede into the background, though actually they lessened not at all, and only presented this illusion because of our growing familiarity with them and because our ears were becoming attuned to other sounds in more major keys, these, too, rising from below as from a great distance, but carrying with them an insidious hellishness in the implications that grew upon us.
For the first whistling sounds were not clear enough to justify any guess as to their origin, and it was not until I had been listening for some time that it occurred to me that the sounds breaking into the weird whistling or whimpering derived from something alive, some sentient being, for presently they resolved into uncouth and shocking mouthings, indistinct and not intelligible even when they could be clearly heard. By this time, Tuttle had put the candle down, had come to his knees, and now half lay down upon the floor with his ear close to the stone.
In obedience to his motion, I did likewise, and found that the sounds from below resolved into more recognizable syllables, though no less meaningless. For the first while, I heard nothing but incoherent and apparently unconnected ululations, with which were interpolated chanting sounds, which later I put down as follows: Iä! Iä! … Shub-Niggurath…. Ugh! Cthulhu fhtagn! … Iä! Iä! Cthulhu!
But that I was in some error in regard to at least one of these sounds, I soon learned. Cthulhu itself was plainly audible, despite the fury of the mounting sound all around; but the word that followed now seemed somewhat longer than fhtagn; it was as if an extra syllable had been added, and yet I could not be certain that it had not been there all the while, for presently it came clearer, and Tuttle took from a pocket his notebook and pencil and wrote:
“They are saying Cthulhu naflfhtagn.”
Judging by the expression of his eyes, faintly elated, this evidently conveyed something to him, but to me it meant nothing, apart from my ability to recognize a portion of it as identical in character with the words that appeared in the abhorred R’lyeh Text, and subsequently again in the magazine story, where its translation would seem to have indicated that the words meant: Cthulhu waits dreaming. My obvious blank ignorance of his meaning apparently recalled to my host that his philological learning was far in excess of mine, for he smiled bleakly and whispered, “It can be nothing else but a negative construction.”
Even then I did not at once understand that he meant to explain that the subterranean voices were not saying what I had thought, but: Cthulhu no longer waits dreaming! There was now no longer any question of belief, for the things that were taking place were of no human origin, and admitted of no other solution than one in some way, however remotely, related to the incredible mythology Tuttle had so recently expounded to me. And now, as if this evidence of feeling and hearing were not enough, there became manifest a strange fetid smell mingled with a nauseatingly strong odor of fish, apparently seeping up through the porous limestone.
Tuttle became aware of this almost simultaneously with my own recognition, and I was alarmed to observe in his features traces of apprehension stronger than any I had heretofore noticed. He lay for a moment quietly; then he rose stealthily, took up the candle, and crept from the room, beckoning me after him.
Only when we were once more on the upper story did he venture to speak. “They are closer that I thought,” he said then, musingly.
“Is it Hastur?” I asked nervously.
But he shook his head. “It cannot be he, because the passage below leads only to the sea and is doubtless partly full of water. Therefore it can only be one of the Water Beings—those who took refuge there when the torpedoes destroyed Devil Reef beyond shunned Innsmouth—Cthulhu, or those who serve him, as the Mi-Go serve in the icy fastnesses, and the Tcho-Tcho people serve on the hidden plateaus of Asia.”
Since it was impossible to sleep, we sat for a time in the library, while Tuttle spoke in a half-chanting manner of the strange things he had come upon in the old books that had been his uncle’s: sat waiting for the dawn while he told of the dreaded Plateau of Leng, of the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, of Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, the Mighty Messenger who walked the star-spaces in the semblance of man; of the horrible and diabolic Yellow Sign, the haunted and fabled towers of mysterious Carcosa; of terrible Lloigor and hated Zhar; of Ithaqua the Snow-Thing, of Chaugnar Faugn and N’gha-Kthun, of unknown Kadath and the Fungi from Yuggoth— so he talked hours while the sounds below continued and I sat listening in a deadly, terror-fraught fear. And yet that fear was needless, for with the dawn the stars paled, and the tumult below died subtly away, fading toward the east and the ocean’s deeps, and I went at last to my room, eagerly, to dress in preparation for my leave-taking.
IV
In little over a month, I was again on my way to the Tuttle estate, via Arkham, in response to an urgent card from Paul, upon which he had scrawled in a shaky hand the single word: Come! Even if he had not written, I should have considered it my duty to return to the old house on Aylesbury Road, despite my distaste for Tuttle’s soul-shaking research and the now active fear I could not help but feel. Still, I had been holding off ever since coming to the decision that I should attempt to dissuade Tuttle from further research until the morning of the day on which his card came. On that morning I found in the Transcript a garbled story from Arkham: I would not have noticed it at all, had it not been for the small head to take the eye: Outrage in Arkham Cemetery, and below: Tuttle Vault Violated. The story was brief, and disclosed little beyond the information already conveyed by the headings:
It was discovered here early this morning that vandals had broken into and partly destroyed the Tuttle vault in Arkham cemetery. One wall is smashed almost beyond repair, and the coffins have been disturbed. It has been reported that the coffin of the late Amos Tuttle is missing, but confirmation cannot be had by the time this issue goes to press.
Immediately upon reading this vague bulletin, I was seized with the strongest apprehension, come upon me from I know not what source; yet I felt at once that the outrage perpetrated upon the vault was not an ordinary crime, and I could not help connecting it in my mind with the occurences at the old Tuttle house. I had therefore resolved to go to Arkham, and thence to see Paul Tuttle, before his card arrived; his brief message alarmed me still more, if possible, and at the same time convinced me of what I feared—that some revolting connection existed between the cemetery outrage and the things that walked in the earth beneath the house on Aylesbury Road. But at the same time I became aware of a deep reluctance to leave Boston, obsessed with an intangible fear of invisible danger from an unknown source. Still, duty compelled my going, and however strongly I might shun it, go I must.
I arrived in Arkham in early afternoon and went at once to the cemetery, in my capacity as solicitor, to ascertain the extent of the damage done. A police guard had been established, but I was permitted to examine the premises as soon as my identity had been disclosed. The newspaper account, I found, had been shockingly inadequate, for the ruin of the Tuttle vault was virtually complete, its coffins exposed to the sun’s warmth, some of them broken open, revealing long-dead bones. While it was true that Amos Tuttle’s coffin had disappeared in the night, it had been found at midday in an open field about two miles east of Arkham, too far from the road to have been carried there; and the mystery of its being there was, if anything, deeper now than at the time the coffin had been found; for an investigation had disclosed certain deep indentations set at wide intervals in the earth, some of them as much as forty feet in diameter! It was as if some monstrous creature had walked there, though I confess that this thought occurred only within my own mind; the impressions in the earth remained a mystery upon which no light was thrown even by the wildest surmises as to their source. This may have been partly due to the more startling fact that had emerged immediately upon the finding of the coffin: the body of Amos Tuttle had vanished, and a search of the surrounding terrain had failed to disclose it. So much I learned from the custodian of the cemetery before I set out along the Aylesbury Road, refusing to think further about this incredible information until I had spoken with Paul Tuttle.
This time my summons at his door was not immediately answered, and I had begun to wonder with some apprehension whether something had happened to him, when I detected a faint scuffling sound beyond the door, and almost immediately heard Tuttle’s muffled voice.
“Who is it?”
“Haddon,” I replied, and heard what seemed to be a gasp of relief.
The door opened, and it was not until it had closed that I became aware of the nocturnal darkness of the hall, and saw that the window at the far end had been tightly shuttered, and that no light fell into the long corridor from any of the rooms opening off it. I forebore to ask the question that came to my tongue and turned instead to Tuttle. It was some time before my eyes had mastered the unnatural darkness sufficiently to make him out, and then I was conscious of a distinct feeling of shock; for Tuttle had changed from a tall, upright man in his prime to a bent, heavy man of uncouth and faintly repulsive appearance, betraying an age which actually was not his. And his first words filled me with high alarm.
“Quick now, Haddon,” he said. “There’s not much time.”
“What is it? What’s wrong, Paul?” I asked.
He disregarded this, leading the way into the library, where an electric candle burned dimly. “I’ve made a packet of some of my uncle’s most valuable books—the R’lyeh Text, The Book of Eibon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts—some others. These must go to the library of Miskatonic University by your hand today without fail. They are henceforth to be considered the property of the library. And here is an envelope containing certain instructions to you, in case I fail to get in touch with you either personally or by telephone—which I have had installed here since your last visit—by ten o’clock tonight. You are staying, I assume, at the Lewiston House. Now attend me closely: if I fail to telephone you to the contrary before ten o’clock tonight, you are to follow the instructions herein contained without hesitation. I advise you to act immediately, and, since you may feel them too unusual to proceed swiftly, I have already telephoned Judge Wilton and explained that I’ve left some strange but vital instructions with you, but that I want them carried out to the letter.”
“What’s happened, Paul?” I asked.
For a moment it seemed as if he would speak freely, but he only shook his head and said, “As yet I do not know all. But this much I can say: we have both, my uncle and I, made a terrible mistake. And I fear it is now too late to rectify it. You have learned of the disappearance of Uncle Amos’s body?”
I nodded.
“It has since turned up.”
I was astounded, since I had only just come from Arkham, and no such intelligence had been imparted to me. “Impossible!” I exclaimed. “They are still searching.”
“Ah, no matter,” he said oddly. “It is not there. It is here—at the foot of the garden, where it was abandoned when it was found useless.”
At this, he jerked his head up suddenly, and we heard the shuffling and grunting sound that came from somewhere in the house. But in a moment it died away, and he turned again to me.
“The haven,” he muttered, and gave a sickly laugh. “The tunnel was built by Uncle Amos, I am sure. But it was not the haven Hastur wanted—though it served the minions of his half-brother, Great Cthulhu.”
It was almost impossible to realize that the sun shone outside, for the murkiness of the room and the atmosphere of impending dread that hung over me combined to lend the scene an unreality apart from the world from which I had just come, despite the horror of the violated vault. I perceived also about Tuttle an air of almost feverish expectancy coupled with a nervous haste; his eyes shone oddly and seemed more prominent than I had previously known them, his lips seemed to have coarsened and thickened, and his beard had become matted to a degree I would not have thought possible. He listened now only for a moment before he turned back to me.
“I myself need to stay for the present; I have not finished mining the place, and that must be done,” he resumed erratically, but went on before the question that rose in me could find utterance. “I’ve discovered that the house rests upon a natural artificial foundation, that below the place there must be not only the tunnel, but a mass of cavernous structures, and I believe that these caverns are for the most part water-filled—and perhaps inhabited,” he added as a sinister afterthought. “But this, of course, is at the present time of small importance. I have no immediate fear of what is below, but what I know is to come.”
Once again he paused to listen, and again vague, distant sounds came to our ears. I listened intently, hearing an ominous fumbling, as if some creature were trying a door, and strove to discover or guess at its origin. I had thought at first that the sound emanated from somewhere within the house, thought almost instinctively of the attic; for it seemed to come from above, but in a moment it was borne in upon me that the sound did not derive from any place within the house, nor yet from any portion of the house outside, but grew from some place beyond that, from a point in the space beyond the walls of the house—a fumbling, plucking noise which was not associated in my consciousness with any recognizable material sounds, but was rather an unearthly invasion. I peered at Tuttle, and saw that his attention was also for something from outside, for his head was somewhat lifted and his eyes looked beyond the enclosing walls, bearing in them a curiously rapt expression, not without fear, nor yet without a strange air of helpless waiting.
“That is Hastur’s sign,” he said in a hushed voice. “When the Hyades rise and Aldebaran stalks the sky tonight, He will come. The Other will be here with His water people, those of the primal gilled races.” Then he began to laugh suddenly, soundlessly, and with a sly, half-mad glance, added, “And Cthulhu and Hastur shall struggle here for the haven while Great Orion strides above the horizon, with Betelgeuse where the Elder Gods are, who alone can block the evil designs of these hellish spawn!”
My astonishment at his words doubtless showed in my face and in turn made him understand what shocked hesitation and doubt I felt, for abruptly his expression altered, his eyes softened, his hands clasped and unclasped nervously, and his voice became more natural.
“But perhaps this tires you, Haddon,” he said. “I will say no more, for the time grows short, the evening approaches, and in a little while the night. I beg you to have no question about following the instructions I have outlined in this brief note for your eyes.
I charge you to follow my directions implicitly. If it is as I fear, even that may be of no avail; if it is not, I shall reach you in time.”
With that he picked up the packet of books, placed it in my hands, and led me to the door, whither I followed him without protest, for I was bewildered and not a little unmanned at the strangeness of his actions, the uncanny atmosphere of brooding horror that clung to the ancient, menace-ridden house.
At the threshold he paused briefly and touched my arm lightly. “Goodbye, Haddon,” he said with friendly intensity.
Then I found myself on the stoop in the glare of the lowering sunlight so bright that I closed my eyes against it until I could again accustom myself to its brilliance, while the cheerful chortle of a late bluebird on a fence-post across the road sounded pleasantly in my ears, as if to belie the atmosphere of dark fear and eldritch horror behind.
V
I come now to that portion of my narrative upon which I am loath to embark, not alone because of the credibility of what I must write, but because it can at best be a vague, uncertain account, replete with surmises and remarkable, if disjointed, evidence of horror-torn, eon-old evil beyond time, of primal things that lurk just outside the pale of life we know, or terrible, animate survival in the hidden places of Earth. How much of this Tuttle learned from those hellish texts he entrusted to my care for the locked shelves of Miskatonic University Library, I cannot say. Certain it is that he guessed many things he did not know until too late; of others, he gathered hints, though it is to be doubted that he fully comprehended the magnitude of the task upon which he so thoughtlessly embarked when he sought to learn why Amos Tuttle had willed the deliberate destruction of his house and books.
Following my return to Arkham’s ancient streets, events succeeded events with undesirable rapidity. I deposited Tuttle’s packet of books with Doctor Llanfer at the library, and made my way immediately after to Judge Wilton’s house, where I was fortunate enough to find him. He was just sitting down to supper, and invited me to join him, which I did, though I had no appetite of any kind, indeed, food seeming repugnant to me. By this time all the fears and intangible doubts I had held had come to a head within me, and Wilton saw at once that I was laboring under an unusual nervous strain.
“Curious thing about the Tuttle vault, isn’t it?” he ventured shrewdly, guessing at the reason for my presence in Arkham.
“Yes, but not half so curious as the circumstance of Amos Tuttle’s body reposing at the foot of his garden,” I replied.
“Indeed,” said he without any visible sign of interest, his calmness serving to restore me in some measure to a sense of tranquility. “I dare say you’ve come from there and know whereof you speak.”
At that, I told him as briefly as possible the story I had come to tell, omitting only a few of the more improbable details, but not entirely succeeding in dismissing his doubts, though he was far too much a gentleman to permit me to feel them. He sat for a while in thoughtful silence after I had finished, glancing once or twice at the clock, which showed the hour to be already past seven. Presently he interrupted his revery to suggest that I telephone the Lewiston House and arrange for any call for me to be transferred to Judge Wilton’s home. This I did instantly, somewhat relieved that he had consented to take the problem seriously enough to devote his evening to it.
“As for the mythology,” he said, directly upon my return to the room, “it can be dismissed as the creation of a mad mind, the Arab Abdul Alhazred. I say advisedly, it can be, but in the light of the things which have happened in Innsmouth I should not like to commit myself. However, we are not at present in session. The immediate concern is for Paul Tuttle himself; I propose that we examine his instructions to you forthwith.”
I produced the envelope at once, and opened it. It contained but a single sheet of paper, bearing these cryptic and ominous lines:
“I have mined the house and all. Go immediately without delay, to the pasture gate west of the house, where in the shrubbery on the right side of the lane as you approach from Arkham, I have concealed the detonator. My Uncle Amos was right—it should have been done in the first place. If you fail me, Haddon, then before God you loose upon the courtryside such a scourge as man has never known and will never see again— if indeed he survives it!”
Some inkling of the cataclysmic truth must at that moment have begun to penetrate my mind, for when Judge Wilton leaned back, looked at me quizzically, and asked, “What are you going to do?” I replied without hesitation: “I’m going to follow those instructions to the letter!”
He gazed at me for a moment without comment; then he bowed to the inevitable and settled back. “We shall wait for ten o’clock together,” he said gravely.
The final act of the incredible horror that had its focal point in the Tuttle house took place just a little before ten, coming upon us in the beginning in so disarmingly prosaic a manner that the full horror, when it came, was doubly shocking and profound. For at five minutes to ten, the telephone rang. Judge Wilton took it at once, and even from where I sat I could hear the agonized voice of Paul Tuttle calling my name.
I took the telephone from Judge Wilton.
“This is Haddon,” I said with a calmness I did not feel. “What is it, Paul?”
“Do it now!” he cried. “Oh, God, Haddon—right away—before … too late. Oh, God—the haven! The haven! … You know the place … pasture gate. O, God, be quick!…” And then there happened what I shall never forget: the sudden, terrible degeneration of his voice, so that it was as if it crumpled together and sank into abysmal mouthings; for the sounds that came over the wire were bestial and crude, brutish, drooling sounds, from among which certain of them recurred again and again, and I listened in steadily mounting horror to the triumphant gibbering before it died away:
“Iä! Iä! Hastur! Ugh! Ugh! Iä Hastur cf’ ayak ’vulgtmm, vugtlagln vulgtmm! Ai! Shub-Niggurath! … Hastur—Hastur cf’tagn! Iä! Iä! Hastur!…”
Then abruptly all sound died away, and I turned to face Judge Wilton’s terror-stricken features. And yet I did not see him, nor did I see anything in my understanding of what must be done; for abruptly, with cataclysmic effect, I understood what Tuttle had failed to know until too late. And at once I dropped the telephone; at once I ran hatless and coatless from the house into the street, with the sound of Judge Wilton frantically summoning police over the telephone fading into the night behind me. I ran with unnatural speed from the shadowed, haunted streets of witch-cursed Arkham into the October night, down the Aylesbury Road, into the lane and the pasture gate, where for one brief instant, while sirens blew behind me, I saw the Tuttle house through the orchard outlined in a hellish purple glow, beautiful but unearthly and tangibly evil.
Then I pushed down the detonator, and with a tremendous roar, the old house burst asunder and flames leaped up where the house had stood.
For a few dazed moments I stood there, aware suddenly of the arrival of the police along the road south of the house, before I began to move up to join them, and so saw that the explosion had brought about what Paul Tuttle had hinted: the collapse of the subterranean caverns below the house; for the land itself was settling, slipping down, and the flames that had risen were hissing and steaming in the water gushing up from below.
Then it was that that other thing happened—the last unearthly horror that mercifully blotted out what I saw in the wreckage jutting out above the rising waters— the great protoplasmic mass risen from the center of the lake forming where the Tuttle house had been, and the thing that came crying out at us across the lawn before it turned to face that other and begin a titanic struggle for mastery interrupted only by the brilliant explosion of light that seemed to emanate from the eastern sky like a bolt of incredibly powerful lightning; a tremendous discharge of energy in the shape of light, so that for one awful moment everything was revealed—before lightning-like appendages descended as from the heart of the blinding pillar of light itself, one seizing the mass in the waters, lifting it high, and casting it far out to sea, the other taking that second thing from the lawn and hurling it, a dark dwindling blot, into the sky, where it vanished among the eternal stars! And then came sudden, absolute, cosmic silence, and where, a moment before, this miracle of light had been, there was now only darkness and the line of trees against the sky, and low in the east the gleaming eye of Betelgeuse as Orion rose into the autumn night.
For an instant I did not know which was worse—the chaos of the previous moment, or the utter black silence of the present; but the small cries of horrified men brought it back to me, and it was borne in upon me then that they at least did not understand the secret horror, the final thing that sears and maddens, the thing that rises in the dark hours to stalk the bottomless depths of the mind. They may have heard, as I did, that thin, far whistling sound, that maddening ululation from the deep, immeasurable gulf of cosmic space, the wailing that fell back along the wind, and the syllables that floated down the slopes of air: Tekeli-li, tekeli-li, tekeli-li … And certainly they saw the thing that came crying out at us from the sinking ruins behind, the distorted caricature of a human being, with its eyes sunk to invisibility in thick masses of scaly flesh, the thing that flailed its arms bonelessly at us like the appendages of an octopus, the thing that shrieked and gibbered in Paul Tuttle’s voice!
But they could not know the secret that I alone knew, the secret Amos Tuttle might have guessed in the shadows of his dying hours, the thing Paul Tuttle was too late in learning: that the haven sought by Hastur the Unspeakable, the haven promised Him Who is not to be Named, was not the tunnel, and not the house, but the body and soul of Amos Tuttle himself, and failing these, the living flesh and immortal soul of him who lived in that doomed house on the Aylesbury Road!