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.