opulent phantasy

'' most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry associated with innsmouth. ... the fragmentary descriptions were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. something about them seemed so odd and provocative that i could not put them out of my mind, ... i resolved to see the local sample said to be a large queerly proportioned thing ... evidently meant for a tiara ...

'' even now i can hardly describe what i saw though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, ... as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzling untraditional designs-- ... chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftmanship of incredible skill and grace ...

'' there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. at first i decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy ... how ever i soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source ... among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion ... every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

body of mythos

'' trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visable, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. '' h.p.lovecraft, dream quest of unknown kadath.

'' original title al azif--azif being the word used by arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons. '' h.p.lovecraft, history of the necronomicon.

'' the good mussulmans fancied that they heard the sullen hum of those nocturnal insects which presage evil, and importuned vathek to beware how he ventured his sacred person. '' william beckford, vathek.

'' both the veda and maitriya upansad of the ancient hindus, who were indo europeans, tell of how the universe was created by sabda brahman, the "eternal sound" that created everything--and still inheres in everything--but is itself uncreated: "begotten, not made," '' j.nigro sansonese, the body of myth.

blood will tell

'' i never heard of innsmouth till the day before i saw it for the first and-so-far last time. ... "innsmouth?" well its a queer kind of town down at the mouth of the manuxet. ... more empty houses than there are people, i guess, ... and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any innsmouth blood they have in `em ... and why is everybody so down on innsmouth? ... they`ve ben telling things about innsmouth--whispering`em mostly--for the past hundred years ... some of the stories would make you laugh ... about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves ... about the black reef off the coast, devil reef, they call it ... the story is that theres a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef ...

'' but the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice ... what a lot our new england ships used to have to do with queer ports in africa, asia, the south seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with`em ... well there must be something like that back of the innsmouth people ... some of `em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin aint quite right. rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up ... nobody around here or in arkham or ipswich will have any thing to do with `em and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town ... they seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other preferable spheres of entity ...

'' their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut-was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. it was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night ... it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public ... one wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the "innsmouth look" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced ... many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoor in someplaces ... what kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had it was impossible to tell ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

i: squint-wail by michael hsu, id-mag may 10, 2008.

flowers of summer

'' the most merciful thing in the world, i think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. we live in on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant to be that we should voyage far. the sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday 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 deadly light into the peace and saftey of a new dark age. ...

'' the time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the great old ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. ... and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. ... i shall never sleep calmly again when i think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, ... wherein is pieced together that which i hope may never be pieced together again. ...

'' i have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. ... who knows the end? loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men, a time will come-but i must not and cannot think.''

i: flowers of summer at zefrank.

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

lovecraft's townscape

'' i had, i realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed innsmouth. it was a town of wide extant and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visable life. ... the vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, ... i could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. ... i could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. all the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed ...

'' soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur ... i strolled out on the square and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly. one side of the cobblestoned space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings ... eastwards i could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful georgian steeples. thus i began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of innsmouth's narrow shadow-blighted ways. ...

'' i struck a region of utter desolation which somehow made me shudder. collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish decapitated steeple of an ancient church ... down unpaved side streets i saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles ... certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather then arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. ... and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigal fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse ...

'' mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds ... in all these streets no living thing was visible ... furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and i could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut ... innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable.''

h.p lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

landscape piece

'' ... then rose the gentle hills behind the town, with their groves and gardens of asphodels and their small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in the background the purple ridge of the tanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay forbidden ways into the waking world and toward other regions of dream. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.

pilgrimage

'' in the shadows of that tavern carter saw a squat form he did not like, for it was unmistakably that of the old slant-eyed merchant he had seen so long ago before in the taverns of dylath-leen, who was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages of leng ... which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar ... and even to have dealt with that high-priest not to be described, ... this man seemed to show a queer gleam of knowing when carter asked the traders of dylath-leen about the coldwaste and kadath; ... he slipped wholly out of sight before carter could speak to him; ...

'' that night carter camped in a roadside meadow beneath a great lygath-tree to which he tied his yak, and in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage ... on the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tethering his yak to a stake driven in the ground ... and on the third morning he came in sight of the first onyx quarry, ... and greeted the men who there laboured with picks and chisels ... the third night he spent in a camp of quarry men whose flickering fires cast weird reflections on the polished cliffs to the west ... in the morning he bade them adieu and rode on into the darkening north, ... turning back to wave a last farewell, he thought he saw approaching the camp that squat and evasive old merchant with slanting eyes, whose conjectured traffic with leng was the gossip of distant dylath-leen. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.

ye that see in darkness ...

'' say, what have ye found?

''--we have seen strange atoms
in worlds of otherwhere.

'' we have seen the nightmares
of the succubi.

'' we have seen the crystal
by black, blood-swollen meres.

'' we have seen the satyrs
weighed down with evening's dew.

'' we have seen the darkness
on some sidereal way.

'' we have seen fair colours
pouring forth the night.''

clark ashton smith, nyctalops.

i: complete poem at the eldritch dark.
ii: bob moss sings nyctalops. a "charles schneider film" at youtube.

mountaineering in oriab

'' in the clear sunshine of morning carter began the long ascent, ... the slope was very precipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying. ... he found it best not to look around, and kept on climbing and climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the tough grass to cling to. ... finally there was nothing at all but the bare rock, and had it not been very rough and weathered, he could scarcely have ascended farther ...

'' once or twice carter dared to look around, and was almost stunned by the spread of landscape below ... as new country came into view below him he saw that it was bleaker and wilder than those seaward lands he had traversed ... at last in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round to the hidden side of ngranek ... poised in windy insequrity miles above earth, with only space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on the other ... if there were no way aloft the night would find him crouching there still, and the dawn would not find him at all. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.

by this symbol ...

'' at last, however they came to a somewhat open space before a tower even vaster than the rest; above whose colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous symbol in bas-relief which made one shudder without knowing its meaning. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.

artistic license

'' the unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were as ghastly as the finished ones upstairs ... there was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and half-finished monstrosities that leered around from every side of the room, and when pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away from the light i could not for my life keep back a loud scream ...

'' it was a collossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in its bony claws a thing that had been a man, ... and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel ... as i am a living being i never elswhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into canvas. the monster was there-it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared-and i knew that only a suspension of natures laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model ...''

h.p.lovecraft, pickman's model.

i: toronto tunnel-ghoul.

parentalia

the facts concerning sir arthur jermyn and his family are these...

'' his great-great-great-grandfather, sir wade jermyn, was one of the earliest explorers of the congo region, in 1765 this fearless explorer had been placed in a madhouse at huntingdon ... madness was in all the jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them ...

''the jermyns never seemed to look quite right--something was amiss ...certainly the madness began with sir wade, ... it showed in his collection of trophies ... and appeared strikingly in the oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife ... whom he had met in africa; ... she with an infant son born in africa; had accompanied him back from the second and longest of his trips, and had gone with him on the third and last, never returning. ...

'' wade jermyn's son philip was a highly peculiar person ... he married the daughter of his game keeper, a person said to be of gypsy extraction, but before his son was born joined the navy ... he was heard of as a sailor on a merchantman in the african trade, finally disappearing one night as his ship lay off the congo coast ...

''in the son of sir philip jermyn the family peculiarity took a strange and fatal turn ... robert jermyn began life as a scholar and investigator. it was he who first studied scientifically the vast collection of relics which his mad grandfather had brought from africa ... his second son nevil ... ran away with a vulgar dancer ... he came back a widower with an infant son, alfred who would one day be the father of arthur jermyn. ...

'' the explorer samuel seaton called at jermyn house with a manuscript of notes collected among the ongas ... when sir robert jermyn emerged from his library he left behind the strangled corpse of the explorer, and before he could be restrained, had put to an end to all three of his children, nevil jermyn died in the successful defence of his own two-year old son, ...

'' sir alfred jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday ... at twenty he had joined a band of music-hall performers, and at thirty-six had deserted his wife and child to travel with an itinerant american circus ... arthur jermyn was the son of sir alfred jermyn and a music hall singer ... and arthur jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, arthur jermyn.

i: jermyn family portraits by alex castro via notcothulhu.

vision or nightmare

'' the place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that i trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. it was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated with rotting stone. on every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, over the valley's rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard of catacombs, ...

'' i could distinguish a repellant array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation ... dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre ...

'' in the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality--a half-sentience. ...

'' amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hilldside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon ...

'' around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; ... i sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and miasmal vapours, ... as i watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the statement of randolph carter.

i: a bike tour through some graveyards.

pilgrimage

'' and when he saw that crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as earths dawn had shaped it, but gleamed red and stupendous in the sunset with the carved and polished features of a god ...

'' stern and terrible shone that face in the sunset lit with fire. how vast it was no mind can ever measure but carter knew at once that man could never have fashioned it. it was a god chiselled by hands of the gods, and it looked down haughtly and majestic upon the seeker ...

'' rumour had said it was strange and not to be mistaken, and carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and long lobed ears and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of man but of gods ...

'' he clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this which he had expected and come to find; for there is in a gods face more of marvel than prediction can tell, and when that face is vaster than a great temple and seen looking downward at sunset in the scyptic silences of that upper world from whose dark lava it was devinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that none may escape it. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

i: leshan riverside giant.

doom without end

[i]'' who knows the end? what has risen many sink, and what has sunk may rise. loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of man ... [ii] i dream of a day when they may rise above the billows ... of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. the end is near ...''

h.p.lovecraft, [i]the call of cthulhu, [ii]dagon.

body of mythos

'' trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

the face

''steadily i neared the great building. then all at once, something came round one of the huge buttresses of the house, and so into full view. it was a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. it was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable, luminous appearance. yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. it was the face of a swine.''

william hope hodgson, the house on the borderland.

a study in xenogamy

'' science, already opressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate extermiator of our species--if seperate species we be ... if we knew what we are, we should do as sir arthur jermyn did, ... arthur jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object which had come from africa ...

'' the boxed object was delivered at jermyn house on the afternoon of august 3,1913, being conveyed immediately to the large chamber ... sir arthur jermyn dismissed everyone from the room before opening the box, though the instant sound of hammer and chisel showed that he did not delay the operation ... less than a quarter of an hour later that the horrible scream, undoubtedly in jermyn's voice; was heard ...

'' immediately afterward jermyn emerged from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of the house as if pursued by some hideous enemy ... finally disappearing down the stairs to the cellar. ... a smell of oil was all that came up from the regions below ... a stable boy saw arthur jermyn, glistening from head to foot with oil and redolant of that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor, ... a spark appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached the the heavens. the house of jermyn no longer existed ...

'' the reason why arthur jermyn's charred fragments were not collected and buried lies in what was found afterward, principally the thing in the box ... it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind--quite shockingly so ... members of the royal anthropological institute burned the thing ... and some of them do not admit that arthur jermyn ever existed.''

h.p.lovecraft, arthur jermyn.

i: ancestor worship at the upright ape.

something about cats

'' it is said in ulthar which lies beyond the river skai, no man may kill a cat, ... in ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors. ... this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel. ... but the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; ... much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more ...




'' one day a caravan of strange wanders entered the narrow cobbled streets of ulthar. ... there was in the caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. ... on the third morning of the wanderers stay in ulthar, menes could not find his kitten, and as he sobbed in aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, ... and when he heard these things his sobbing gave way to meditation, and finally to prayer. ...

'' that night the wanderers left ulthar, and were never seen again. and the housholders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found ... the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of mene's kitten ... the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; ... so ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn--behold! every cat was back ...

'' there was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of ulthar ... they talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small menes and his kittten, of the prayer of menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard. and in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law ... that in ulthar no man may kill a cat.''

h.p.lovecraft, the cats of ulthar.


i: house-cats at apotropaios.
ii: a cat named annie at zefrank.
iii: toy cadaver at bj winslow.
iv: cat eats man at messybeast.

the dome like skull of ibid

'' his remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of italy, were taken to ravenna for interment ... were exhumed and ridiculed by the lombard duke of spoleto, who took his skull to king autharis ... ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the lombard line ... the skull was seized by the tottering desiderius and carried in the train of the frankish conqueror ... charlemagne took ibid's skull to his capital at aix, ... william the conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche ... did reverence to its osseous antiquity; ...

'' it was captured by the private soldier read-'em-and-weep hopkins, who not long after traded it to rest-in-jehovah stubbs ... stubbs, upon sending forth his son zerubbabel to seek his fortune ... gave him st.ibid's ... skull as a talisman. upon landing in salem zerrubbabel ... having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one epenetus dexter, ... it was in the house of dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of north main and olney streets, ... but the austere head of ibid continued on its wanderings ...

'' petrus van schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in lombardic miniscules ... from van schaack, sad to say the relic was stolen in 1683 by a french trader, jean grenier ... fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy relic by a protestant, crushed van schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon however being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur michael savard, who took the skull ... to add to a collection of similar but more recent material ...

'' his half-breed son pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the sacs and foxes, ... charles de langlade, founder of the trading post at green bay, ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; later traded to jacques caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named hans zimmerman; ... where falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery ...

'' so for generations did the skull ... lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town ... at first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a diety sent from the upper world, ... and at last one fateful night a titan thing occured. subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ectasy, ... laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble and behold! ... subterrene arcana hidden for years came at last to light. for there in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly and consular pomp the dome like skull of ibid.''

h.p.lovecraft, ibid.


i: amethyst skull talisman at rene's custom jewelery.

magah birds

'' the whole air was fragant with balsam, and the magah birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colors in the sun ... around him he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in oriab; and when upon awaking once he thought he felt the wings of some insect brushing his face he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till roused by the magah birds in distant resin groves.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

i: magah-birds and shantak skull.

flight of the shantak-bird

'' then the man motioned carter to mount one of the repugnant shantaks ... it was hard work ascending, for the shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and those scales are very slippery ... once he was seated the slant-eyed man hopped up behind him ...

'' there now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, ... beyond which leng was said to be ... far above the clouds they flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled summits of which the folk of inquanok have never seen, ... carter saw them very plainly as they passed below, and saw upon their top most peaks strange caves ... he noticed that both the man and the horse-headed shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, ...

'' the shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey barren plain whereon at great distances shone little feeble fires ... around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, ... very slowly and awkwardly did these forms leap; and with an insane twisting and bending not good to behold ... as the shantak flew lower, the repulsivness of the dancers became tinged with a cetain hellish familiarity, ... they leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet and seemed to wear a sort of wig or headpiece with small horns ...

'' but the shantak flew on past the fires ... and soared over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and ice and snow ... and still the vile bird winged meaningly through the cold and silence ... and finally they came to a wind-swept table-land which seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world ... the lothsome bird now settled to the ground,''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

i: grinning shantak-bird, perpetrated by goya, at norton simon museum.

table-book in the house

'' i opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-cieled chamber ... it appeared to be a kind of sitting room, for it had a table and several chairs ... what interested me was the uniform air of archaism as dispayed in every visible detail ...

'' most of the houses in this region i had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room i could not discover a single article of definitely post revolutionary date. had the furnishings been less humble the place would of been a collectors paradise ...

'' as i surveyed this quaint apartment i felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house ... i felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which i had noticed. the first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size ... it was bound in leather with metal fittings ...

'' when i opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, ... i had often heard of this work with its curious illustrations by the brothers de bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. ... nor would i soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet ... the volume tended to fall open of itself at plate xii, ... i experienced some shame at my suseptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me.'' h.p.lovecraft, the picture in the house.

pedestals quasihexagonal

'' there were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible designs and disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry ... gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise, and surmounted by cloaked, ill defined shapes ... one of the pedestals was vacant, ... another pedestal taller than the rest, and at the centre of the oddly curved line--neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola--which they formed.''

h.p.lovecraft and e.hoffman price, through the gates of the silver key.


i: quasihexagonal coffea-table.

the body of mythos

'' 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; ... it seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster of a form which only a diseased fancy could concieve.


'' if i say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human charicature, 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 ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu

forgotten books and scrolls

'' i never learned its title for the early pages were missing but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling ... there was a formula--a sort of list of things to say and do--it was a key--a guide--to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know...

'' i remember how i read the book at last--white faced and locked in the attic room that i had long devoted to strange searchings ... it was by the light of candles that i read...then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high above the other roofs of the city ... it came as i droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay, and i knew amidst my shuddering what it meant. for he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow and never again can be alone...

'' dogs had a fear of me for they felt the outside shadow which never left my side ... but still i read more--in hidden, forgotten books and scrolls to which my new vision led me--and pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and life-patterns toward the core of unknown cosmos. '' h.p.lovecraft, the book

astropolis

'' into the north window of my chamber glows the pole star with uncanny light ... and in the autumn of the year, i sit by the casement and watch that star ... winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some message, ... sometimes, when it is cloudy i can sleep ...

'' and it was under a horned waning moon that i saw the city for the first time, still and somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow betwixt strange peaks. of ghastly marble were its walls and in the marble streets were marble pillars, ... overhead scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching pole star ... upon my memory was graven the vision of the city ...

'' the pole star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, watching hideously like an insane eye which strives to convey some message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.''

h.p.lovecraft, polaris.

et in arkham ego

'' he was in the changeless legend haunted city of arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the king's men in the dark olden days of the province ...


'' nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him--for it was this house and this room which likewise had harboured old keziah mason, ... she had told judge hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through walls of space to other spaces beyond, ... then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished ...


'' old keziah he reflected might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space as we know it? ... he knew his room was in the old witch house ... that, indeed was why he had taken it ...


'' gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape the north was standing perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction ... there was no access--to the space which must of existed between the slanting wall and straight outer wall on the houses north side, ...


'' the curious angles of gilmans room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him ... he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting cieling met the inward-slanting wall ... his absorption in the irregular walls and cieling of this room increased, for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical signifigance. ''

h.p.lovecraft, dreams in the witch house.

i: a book by john modrow containing some cautionary advice on staring too intently at the cracks in the cieling, peeling paint, and strange angles of your room.
ii:witch house k in sapporo by sekkei-sha
ii: witch house in argentina.

terra-nova

'' the great war was then at its very beginning ... it was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad pacific that the packet of which i was supercargo fell a victem to the german sea raider ... five days after we were taken i managed to escape alone in a small boat ...

'' when i fanally found myself adrift and free, i had but little idea of my surroundings ... i drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land ...

'' the change happened whilst i slept. its details i shall never know for my slumber, though troubled and dream infested, was continuous. when at last i awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as i could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away ...

'' as i crawled into the stranded boat i realised that ... through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface ... so great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me that i could not detect the faintest noise of the surging of the ocean, strain my ears as i might. i remember little. i believe i sang a great deal and laughed oddly when i was unable to sing ...

'' when i came out of the shadow i was in a san francisco hospital; ... of any land upheaval in the pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; ... nor did i deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which i knew they could not believe ... often i ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm--a mere freak of fever as i lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the german man-of-war. '' h.p.lovecraft, dagon.

i: new islands at the energy collective, via dailygrail

nameless muse

'' wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, ... st.john and i had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movment which promised respite from our devestating ennui ... which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear i mention with shame and timidity--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing ...

'' our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities ... it was a secret room, far, far underground; around the walls of this repellant chamber were cases of antique mummies ... niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution ...

'' statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by st.john and myself. a locked portfolio bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnamable drawings which it was rumoured goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge ... whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity ...

'' it is of this loot in particular that i must not speak ...thank god i had the courage to destroy it long before i thought of destroying myself.'' h.p.lovecraft, the hound.

deoxyriboshoggothic acid

'' it was under the sea ... that they first created earth life ... certain multicellular protoplasmic masses ... capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs ... these viscous masses were without doubt what abdul alhazred whispered about as the "shoggoths" in his frightful necronomicon ... they were normally shapeless entities composed of a vicous jelly which looked like an aggultination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere ...

'' they seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the permian age ... when a veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them ... and in the end had achieved a complete victory ... though durihg the rebellion the shoggoths had shown an ability to live out of water this transition was not encouraged ... but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and aquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented a formidible problem. ''

h.p.lovecraft, at the mountains of madness.


i: shoggoth fetish art via notcothulhu.
ii: shoggoth experiments at notcothulhu.
iii: shoggoth war maneuvers at artcom.de, via notcothulhu.

who or what was my great-great-great-grandfather

'' one shall bee in years to come that shal looke backe and use what saltes or stuff for saltes you shal leave him. job xiv,xiv ...

'' this matter of the portrait interested him, particularly, since he would have given much to know just what joseph curwen looked like ... in three days he returned with an artist of long experiance, mr. walter dwight, ... and that accomplished restorer of paintings set to work at once ... as day by day the work of restoration progressed charles ward looked on with growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled after their long oblivion, ...

'' the subject was a spare, well shaped man ... a thin, calm undistinguished face which seemed somehow familiar; ... and to confront the bewildered charles dexter ward, dweller in the past, with his own living features in the countenance of his horrible great-great-great-grandfather... ... ...

'' somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague terror to the features of joseph curwen which stared blandly down from the overmantel ... he stopped before leaving to study the picture closely, marvelling at its resembalance ... cosmo alexander, he decided was a painter worthy of the scotland that produced raeburn, and a teacher worthy of his illustious pupil gilbert stuart. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the case of charles dexter ward.

''job 14,14-if a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will i wait , till my change come,''

pleasure in horror

'' searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. for them are the catacombs of ptolemais, ... the scattered stones of forgotten cities in asia ... and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands ...



'' but the true epicure in the terrible ... esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods new england. most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, ... two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, ...

'' they are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare ... silent, sleepy, staring houses ... sometimes one feels it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must dream often. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the picture in the house.

i: scattered stones of forgotten estates of the hudson valley.

rumours of shantak-birds

''carter had taken passage on their dark ship, telling them that he was an old onyx miner and wishful to work in their quarries ... on later days they talked of the quarries in which carter said he was going to work ... there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; ... but it was thought best not to trouble that quarry, ... so it was left all alone in the twilight with only the raven and the rumoured shantak-bird to brood on its immensities ...

i: shantak skull with veil.



''and they whispered that the rumoured shantak-birds are no wholesome thing it being indeed best that no man has ever truly seen one ... once in a while a raven would croak far overhead and now and then a flapping behind some vast rock would make him think uncomfortably of the rumoured shantak-bird ... huge ravens flapped and croaked and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness ...

i: shantak skull and eggs.


''they were not birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, for they were larger than elephants and had heads like a horse's. carter knew that they must be the shantak-birds of ill rumour, ... a noxious horde of leering shantaks to whose wings still clung the rime and nitre of the nether pits ... fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares that pressed around in great unholy circles,''

i: shantak cultist.


h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

wish you were here...

'' along the shore the cloud waves break, the twin suns sink behind the lake, the shadows lengthen in carcosa.

'' strange is the night where black stars rise, and strange moons circle through the skies but stranger still is lost carcosa.

'' songs that the hyades shall sing, where flap the tatters of the king, must die unheard in dim carcosa.

'' song of my soul, my voice is dead; die thou, unsung, as tears unshed shall dry and die in lost carcosa. ''

r.w.chambers, the king in yellow.

dear baffling diary

''an almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's desk.

''after a week of debate it was sent to miskatonic university, together with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease ...

''the curious manuscript record or diary of wilbur whatley, delivered to miskatonic university for translation, had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts on languages both ancient and modern, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. the final conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet, though none of the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue ...

''the old ledger was at length given wholly in to the charge of dr.armitage, both beacause of his peculiar interest in the whatley matter, and because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.'' h.p.lovecraft, the dunwich horror.

innsmouth bijou

''in the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design which had apparently been worn around the sleepers neck. it was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi canine face, ... around the base was an inscription in characters which neither st.john nor i could identify; and on the bottom like a maker's seal was graven a grotesque and formidable skull ... we recognized it as the thing hinted at in the forbidden necronomicon of the mad arab abdul alhazred;'' h.p.lovecraft, the hound.

boreal charm

''slumber watcher till the spheres six and twenty thousand years have revolv'd and i return to the spot where now i burn. other stars anon shall rise to the axis of the skies; stars that soothe and stars that bless with sweet forgetfulness: only when my round is o'er shall the past disturb thy door.''

h.p.lovecraft, polaris.

who or what was my great-great-grand mother ?

''one night i had a frightful dream in which i met my grandmother under the sea... she had changed-as those who take to the water change-this was to be my realm, too-i could not escape it. i would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.''


h.p.lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

the onyx zone

''yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? radiant with beauty, the cup of the ptolemies was carven of onyx.''

i: dark onyx set in silver

h.p.lovecraft, supernatural horror in literature.

characters undecipherable

''the weird studies of harley warren were well known to me, ... of his vast collection of strange rare books on forbidden subjects i have read all that are written in the languages of which i am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages i cannot understand ... and the fiend inspired book which he carried in his pocket out of the world---the book which warren carried with him---that ancient book ... was written in characters whose like i never saw elsewhere.''

h.p.lovecraft, the statement of randolph carter.

i: a worksite by rene zandbergen on the voynich codex.

fragments of atmosphere

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconcious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


i: ''where courts of this kind are found close to each other in the city, they suggest an inward, closed world seperated from the street. one begins to get a reading of a neutral exterior urban space, left empty for the benifit of vehicles and representing some kind of stiff, formal public behavior, while behind the walls of the courts lurk all the forbidden temptations to act privately and freely...'', polyzoides stefano, etal; courtyard housing in los angeles: a typological analysis.

ii: ''a portrait, a painting ... paint it today. white pear trees and a wysteria... the wysteria long embedded in the under shingles of the low roof, ... the pear an english bartlett-a french cuissemadame ... yet a beautiful thing, a perfect thing is inevitably broken. the small bird, fallen from its nest was so hideous, so wormlike with a repellent gruesomeness the smooth, clean, snakelike angleworms or the flat garden grubs never had. the egg was so pretty ... the small bird was an uncanny monster. ... the child {claw like hands,} ... a bird or intermediate, of a lost reptile race, clawing its way into the pear-wysteria tangle ... a portrait? paint it yesterday, wreathed with cornflowers-paint it today ... crawling into the rabbit hutch ... scent of old straw ... crawling, crawling with the elbows scraping ... to be rewarded at the last with a vision of eight pink bodies. to be lifted one by one from the nest of tight packed straw...''. h.d, paint it today.

dream tree

''then near sunset of the second day there loomed up ahead the snowy peak of aran with its gingko-trees swaying on the lower slopes.'' h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

i: gingko-nuts, at tasteofhongkong, via tastespotting.
ii: gingko leaf memoirs, at appree-korea via designboom.
iii: tongsui-gingko with magah-bird eggs, at quaypo cooks, via tastespotting.

brown jenkin

"the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn...descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as the familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details...that object-no larger than a good sized rat and quaintley called by the towns people "brown jenkin"--seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it...(that was in 1692--the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small white fanged furry thing)...there were recent rumors too,...witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands." h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.

demeaculumn

"and i saw that all the travellers were converging ... at the top of a high hill, ... where perched a great white church ... the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church ... to the trap door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit ... i followed dumbly down the foot worn steps and into the dark suffocating crypt ... into a venerable tomb ... and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase ... a narrow spiral staircase ... that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill ... it was a silent shocking descent ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the festival.

zenig of aphorat

" zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.

i: lucky skull of zenig.
ii. zipperpull of zenig.

zenig of aphorat

"zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name." h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath

i: silver prongs of setting clasped to the mandible of amethyst skull.

ii: skull in relief on an amethyst cobochon.

ii:skull of jet-stone set in silver