"yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? radiant with beauty, the cup of the ptolemies was carven of onyx." h.p.lovecraft, supernatural horror in literature.
nor is it to be thought, (ran the text as armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earths masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. the old ones were, the old ones are, and the old ones shall be. not in the spaces we know, but between them.
they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. yog-sothoth knows the gate. yog-sothoth is the gate. yog-sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. past, present, future all are one in yog-sothoth. he knows where the old ones broke through of old, and where they shall break through again. he knows where they have trod earths fields and where they still tread them, and why know one can behold them as they tread.
by their smell can men sometimes know them near, but of their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those they have begotten on mankind; and of those there are many sorts, differing in likeness from mans truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is them.
they walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the words have been spoken and the rites howled through at their seasons. the wind gibbers with their voices, and the earth mutters with their consciousness. they bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites.
kadath in the cold waste hath known them, and what man knows kadath? the ice deserts of the south and the sunken isles of the ocean hold stones wherein their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? great Cthulhu is their cousin, yet can he spy them only dimly.
ial shrub-niggurath! as a foulness shall ye know them. their hand is at your throats, yet ye see them not; and their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. yog-sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet.
man rules now where they ruled once; they shall soon rule where man rules now. after summer is winter, and after winter summer. they wait patient and potent, for here shall they reign again.
''they worshiped , so they said, the great old ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. those old ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. ...
''those first men formed the cult around small idols which the great ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. ... meanwhile the cult, by approriate rites, must keep the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophesy of their return.''
''wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, ... st.john and i had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement 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.''
'' 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 ... however 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. '' ''but the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the orne jewellery in a downtown safe-deposit vault. some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. ... as my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hidiousness of the designs. artists and archeologists who had seen them pronounced the workmanship superlativley and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. there were two armlets, a tiara , and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of an almost unbearable extravagance. ''he seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but i doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. i did not expect it, either, for i thought i was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. h.p.lovecraft;the shadow over innsmouth.
''i wish i could write like h.p. lovecraft. lovecraft was a man with a vision of the world: astonishing macabre, intricate as a giger drawing. his sense of cosmoses opening out of cosmoses, of dark abysses concealing in their hearts the entrances to further gulfs, infuses nearly everything he wrote with an atmosphere, not of horror, but of wonder. his worlds have an air of completeness.
''the things that can be said about howard phillips lovecraft don't sum up, or even come close to summing up, what his writing is. on the downside, his writing is racist and sexist and wildly open to parody because it is so original, so idiosyncratic. every year or so I go on a lovecraft binge, devouring story after story the way a glutton sits in a corner devouring cookies. then I associate with those persons of more elevated tastes and feel a little ashamed of myself. but then I meet the eyes of other lovecraft addicts, and we smile.
''reading lovecraft's writing, one has the impression of a man so caught up in his vision that he is struggling to find language with which to share what he sees. bizarre and elaborate words, piled atop one another in baroque cacophony, seem the only outlet he can find to convey the fulgent richness of his dream, to explain what is, at heart, inexplicable or at least incomprehensible: to name the nightmare. to those of a certain temperament, that legion of my fellow addicts, h.p. lovecraft's tales are enormous fun.
''in many of the lesser-known stories we find themes or images that recur in later or better-known works, stories played out from other angles but returning again and again to the same core nightmares. ... the takeover of ones body by some entity of the past ... "bad blood" or evil or alien ancestry, forgotten for a time, that returns to destroy an innocent scion of the family. ... men ( at the moment I cannot think of a single lovecraft story in which a woman was the linchpin of the plot's evil--even asenath Waite was actually a man ) who delved for forbidden knowledge, acquired forbidden knowledge, and surrendered their humanity in the process. ... his thesis that humanity is but a blundering set of Johnny-come-lately peasants stumbling amid the terrible secrets of unknown ancients opens the door to endless narrative possibilities. ...
'' i'm still not sure that any of this explains the fascination of lovecraft, the power that his images and themes exert over so much of the literature of horror and the fantastic, ... maybe it's just that lovecraft takes such obvious pleasure in what he writes. enthusiasm is contagious. he was clearly a man who loved his craft.''
''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. 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."
''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.''
''they worshipped so they said the great old ones who lived ages before there where any man, and who came to the young world out of the sky. those old ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea ... mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. but these were not the great old ones. no man had ever seen the old ones. ...
'' there had been aeons when other things ruled on the earth, ... they all died vast epochs of time before man came,but there were arts which could revive them when the stars come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity ... when the stars were right, they could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live. but although they no longer lived, they would never really die. they all lay in stone houses in their great city of r'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for them. ...
'' in the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed old ones in dreams, but had then something had happened. the great stone city r'leyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; ... but memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. ''
''when there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a daemon trumpet. ... presently from the chamber's uttermost reaches a new sound came. this, too, was a rhythmic trumpeting; ... in this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody of etheral dream; exotic vistas of imagined loveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. ...
"hei! ai-shanta nygh!'' ...
''then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds and horrors slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. 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.''
''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.''
'' outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nether most confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity--the boundless daemon sultan azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; ...
'' that last amorphous blight of nether-most confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud ... those inconcievable, unlighted chambers beyond time wherein azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes. ''
''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. 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."
''atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer no man to tell that he hath looked upon them. lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remain. sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes.
''in ulthar, which lies beyond the river skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold the gods of earth; ... his name was barzai the wise, and the villagers tell of how he went up a mountain on the night of the strange eclipse. barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself.
''he believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from their wrath, so resolved to go up the summit of high and rocky hatheg-kla on a night when he knew the gods would be there. ... the villagers of hateg-kla say it is ill to climb the hateg-kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night when pale vapours hide the summit and the moon;
''but barzai heeded them not when he came from neighboring ulthar with the young priest atal, who was his disciple. ... many days they travelled and from afar saw lofty hateg-kla with his aureole of mournful mist. ... the way was rocky and made perilous by chasms, cliffs, and falling stones, ... for three days they climbed higher and higher toward the roof of the world; then they camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.
''for four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thin mournful mist around the silent pinnacle. then on the fifth night which was the night of the full moon, barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with atal to watch them draw near.
''barzai was wise in the lore of earth's gods, and listened hard for certain sounds, but atal felt the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night, and feared much. and when barzai began to climb higher and beckon eagerly, it was long before atal would follow.
''then through the high mists he heard thte voice of barzai shouting wildly in delight: "i have heard the gods. i have heard earth's gods singing in revelry on hateg-kla! ... the wisdom of barzai hath made him greater than earth's gods and against his will their spells and barriers are as naught; barzai will behold the gods, the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of earth who spurn the sight of man!"
''then he heard barzai's voice grow shrill and louder: "the other gods! the other gods! the gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth! ... look away ... go back ... do not see! do not see! the vengeance of the infnite abysses ... that cursed, that damnable pit ... merciful gods of earth, i am falling into the sky!"
''barzai the wise they never found, nor could the holy priest atal ever be persuaded to pray for his souls rerpose. ... and above the mists on hateg-kla earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown kadath in ships of cloud and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.''
'' 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 ... ''
''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 dreamquest of unknown kadath.
'' 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. ''
''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 ..."
''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. 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."
''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,''
"so i spent part of that evening at the newburyport public library looking up data about innsmouth... the essex county historys on the library shelves had very little to say... the epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsley treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county...most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with innsmouth."
''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 conceive.
''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
''not only can the yogi experiance the vagus nerve in and of itself, but by means of neurological connections to the vision area of the brain at the back of the skull, he or she can even visualize the nerve... is such a visualization a myth? and if so, what myth is it? our answer is that it is not a single myth but refers to an entire genre of myth; slaying the kraken, or, sea monster. ... it is a description of the brain and its twelve cranial nerves. the myth of the kraken, whose many tentacles reach deep into the viscera, is a description of the struggle with the vagus nerve.''
aklo musics c-d, beyond madness, including the classic nyarlathotep.
''screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell.
''a sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blilndly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.
''beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness.
''and through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums , and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods--the blind, voicless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is nyarlathotep.''
''Arrived at the city of Hems, on the border of the Orontes, and being in the neighborhood of Palmyra of the desert, I resolved to visit its celebrated ruins. After three days journeying through arid deserts, having traversed the Valley of Caves and Sepulchres, on issuing into the plain, I was suddenly struck with a scene of the most stupendous ruins—a countless multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. Among them were magnificent edifices, some entire, others in ruins; the earth every where strewed with fragments of cornices, capitals, shafts, entablatures, pilasters, all of white marble, and of the most exquisite workmanship. After a walk of three-quarters of an hour along these ruins, I entered the enclosure of a vast edifice, formerly a temple dedicated to the Sun; and accepting the hospitality of some poor Arabian peasants, who had built their hovels on the area of the temple, I determined to devote some days to contemplate at leisure the beauty of these stupendous ruins.
''Daily I visited the monuments which covered the plain; and one evening, absorbed in reflection, I had advanced to the Valley of Sepulchres. I ascended the heights which surround it from whence the eye commands the whole group of ruins and the immensity of the desert. The sun had sunk below the horizon: a red border of light still marked his track behind the distant mountains of Syria; the full-orbed moon was rising in the east, on a blue ground, over the plains of the Euphrates; the sky was clear, the air calm and serene; the dying lamp of day still softened the horrors of approaching darkness; the refreshing night breezes attempered the sultry emanations from the heated earth; the herdsmen had given their camels to repose, the eye perceived no motion on the dusky and uniform plain; profound silence rested on the desert; the howlings only of the jackal,* and the solemn notes of the bird of night, were heard at distant intervals. Darkness now increased, and through the dusk could only be discerned the pale phantasms of columns and walls. The solitude of the place, the tranquillity of the hour, the majesty of the scene, impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city deserted, the memory of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my mind to high contemplations. I sat on the shaft of a column, my elbow reposing on my knee, and head reclining on my hand, my eyes fixed, sometimes on the desert, sometimes on the ruins, and fell into a profound reverie.''
constantin francois de volney; the ruins. complete text at project gutenberg.
''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.''
a demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain crochet doilies.
''he was getting an intuitive knack for solving reimannian equations, and astonished professor upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored the rest of the class. one afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalatic gulfs themselves ...
''gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. what made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might--given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement--step deliberately from earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
''such a step he said would require only two stages; first, a passage out of three dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. ... gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. professor upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity--human or prehuman--whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.''
''then we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with a dim atavistical menace which i had not seemed to notice in the daytime. even the smallest of them held a hint of the ghastly--for was it not in this that they had buried queen nitocris alive in the sixth dynasty; subtle queen nitocris, who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates? i recalled that the arabs whisper things about nitocris, and shun the third pyramid at certain phases of the moon. it must have been over her that thomas moore was brooding when he wrote a thing muttered about by memphian boatmen: the subterranean nymph that dwells 'mid sunless gems and glories hid--the lady of the pyramid!''
h.p.lovecraft and erich weiss, imprisoned with the pharaohs.
'' 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.''
''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.
''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.''
''i have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titantic significance of dreams, and if the obscure world to which they belong. ... from my experiance i cannot doubt that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sourjourning in another and uncorporeal life far different nature from the life ewe know, and of which only the slightest and most indisticnct memories linger after waking. ... sometimes i believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terrequeous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
''it was from a youthful revry filled with speculations of this sort that i arose one afternoon in the winter of 1900-01. when to the state sychopathic institution in which i served as an intern was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. joe slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state police men, and who was described as a highly dangerous character, ... from the medical and court document we learned all that could be gathered of his case: the man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper had always been strange in the eyes of his primative associates. he had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populous. ...
'' i have said that i am a constant speculator concearning dream-life, and from this you may judge of the eagerness witht which i applied my self to thte study of thte new partient as soon as i had fully ascertained the facts of his case. ... it had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic of molecular motion, convertible into other waves or radiant energy like heat, light and electricity. this belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apperatus, and i had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar the the cumbersome devices employed in wireless telegraphy of that crude, preradio period. ...
''now in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of joe slater, i sought these instruments again, and spent several days in repairing them for action. ... when they were complete once more i missed no opportunity for their trial. at each outburst of slater's violence, i would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. i had but little notion of how the thought-impressions would , if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain, but i felt certain tht i could detect and interpret them.''
''now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: "ph'nglui mqlw'nafh cthulhu r'lyeh wgah'nagl phtagn."
''no one could read the old writing now. but things were told by word of mouth. the chanted ritual was not the secret--that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. the chant meant only this: " in his house at r'lyeh dead cthulhu waits dreaming." ''
h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.
mesostic at wikinomicon.
shaPes theM resurreCt wateRs Would oF
tHe aGain The fuLl aGain tHe
Not cycLe cHosen mYstery stArs iniTiate
Great When bUt Even rigHt reAd
oLd pluNge rLyeh tHought am liNks strollinG
came,bUt stArs witH mArch iN
whIch oF sUnk throuGh
H deathLess
'' "what do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. we see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. with five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close and hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
'' i have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now i believe i have found a way to break down the barriers. i am not joking. within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense-organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man, and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. we shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. we shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. we shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation." ''
'' they worshipped so they said the great old ones who lived ages before there where any man, and who came to the young world out of the sky. those old ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea ... mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. but these were not the great old ones. no man had ever seen the old ones. ...
'' there had been aeons when other things ruled on the earth, ... they all died vast epochs of time before man came,but there were arts which could revive them when the stars come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity ... when the stars were right, they could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live. but although they no longer lived, they would never really die. they all lay in stone houses in their great city of r'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for them. ...
'' in the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed old ones in dreams, but had then something had happened. the great stone city r'leyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. but memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. ''
''no book had ever really hinted of it. though the deathless chinamen said the there were double meanings in the necronomicon of the mad arab abdul alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet; "that is not dead which, can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."''
''it happened on a summer's holiday that past a mad-house gate i took my way. within the bedlam was a sage confin'd who from too much study lost his mind. now strolling out, in watchful keeper's care, with childish sounds the madman fill'd the air. still dreaming of his letter'd days of yore, his ravings on remember'd subjects bore; dim came the thoughts of what he us'd to teach, and he began to curse our english speech.
"aha!" quoth he, "the men that made our tongue were arrant rogues, and i shall have them hung. for long establish'd custom what care have we? come, let us tear down etymology. let spelling fly, and naught but sound remain; the world is mad, and i alone am sane!"
''thus rav'd the sage; inventing, as he walk'd, a hundred ways to spell our words as talk'd. he simplify'd until his fancy bred a system quite as simple as his head. in scholarship disasterous change he wrought, and alter'd as he went, for want of thought.''
''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 ...''
''my knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my grand-uncle george gammell angell, professor emeritus of semetic languages in brown university, providence, rhode island. ... locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. the professor had been stricken whilst returning from the new-port boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in williams street, ...
''as my grand-uncles heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, i was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in boston , ... but there was one box i found exceedingly puzzling, and which i felt averse from shewing to other eyes. for what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and writings which i found? ... the bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origins. ... it seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form only a diseased fancy could conceive. ... the writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in professor angell's most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style. what seemed to be the main document was headed "cthulhu cult" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. ...
''the matter of the cult still remained to facinate me, and at times i had visions of personal fame from researches into the origins and connexions ... for i felt sure that i was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. ... one thing i began to suspect, and which i now fear i know, is that my uncle's death was far from natural. ... i think professor angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much, whether i shall go as he did remains to be seen, for i have learned much now. ...
''if heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eyes on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. ... i had largely given over my inquiries into what professor angell called the "cthulhu cult", and was visiting a learned friend in paterson, new jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. ... the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image. ...
''eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, i scanned the item in detail; and i carefully tore it out for immediate action. it read as follows. [mystery derelict found at sea vigilant arrives with helpless armed new zealand yacht in tow. one survivor and dead man found aboard. tale of desperate battle and death at sea. rescued seaman refuses particulars of strange experiance. odd idol found in his possesion inquiry to follow.]
''here were new treasuries of data on the cthulhu cult, ... what was the unknown island on which six of the emma's crew had died, and about which the mate johansen was so secretive? ... i was now resolved to visit mate johansen in oslo ... i made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front, a sad faced woman in black answered my summons, and i was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting english that gustaf johansen was no more. he had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. ... during a walk through a narrow lane near the gothenburg docks, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. ...
''i now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till i too am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise. ... but i do not think my life will be long. as my uncle went, as poor johansen went, so i shall go, i know too much, and the cult still lives.''
''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.
''the spring day had started slowly as i had come to paris by train from london. the carriages had meandered through southern england, as if to give the passengers time to appreciate the picture postcard views of kent, before speeding through the featureless landscapes of northern france, impatient for the graceful architecture of paris, among which is one of the most remarkable perspectives in europe.
''from the midpoint of the arch de triomphe the line of sight along the champs elysees leads first to the obelisk at the centre of the place de la concorde and then runs the length of the tuileries gardens to the open arms of the louvre. where this line passes through the tuileries it has been used like a mirror with such draughtman's like precision the two halves of the garden are perfect reflections of one another. ...
''the entrance to the tuileries holds sinister statues of philosophers, gods, and dead frenchmen in its embrace; to your left and to your right the guardians stand in perfect symmetry. ... to every statue on one side there is a statue on the other, to every tree a tree, to every flower garden on the north side there is another planted at the same distance to the south. a water fountain sprays from the mouth of a nymph who is gazing soulfully at its clone, forever seperated by twice the distance to the centre line of the park.
''and so it went on until i saw the headless devil twenty metres down a side path. i knew that behind me, as yet unseen, would be a mirror image of this path that would lead to a correspondingly positioned plinth and fiendish statue. i half expected that this too would be broken, so preserving the symmetry of the park, but when i turned and looked i saw that its diabolic twin grinned from its plinth as it had done since the creation. in the entire garden the designer symmetry was perfect with the sole exception of the headless lucifer.''
''it was in the township of dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farm house set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that wilbur whately was born at 5am on sunday, the second of febuary, 1913. this date was recalled because it was candlemas, which people in dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the country side had barked persistently, throughout the night before. ...
''there was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the dogs' barking on the night wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming. neighbors knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when old whateley drove his sleigh through the snow into dunwich village and discoursed incoherantly to the group of loungers at osborn's general store. ... "i dun't keer what folks think--ef lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nuthin' ye expeck. ye needn't think the only folks is the folks here abouts ... let me tell ye suthin'--some day yew folks'll hear a child o' lavinny's a-callin its faher's name on the top o' sentinel hill!"
''the only persons who saw wilbur during the first month of his life were old zechariah whately, of the undecayed whateleys' and earl sawyers common-law wife, mammie bishop. mammie's visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations; ... public interest in the whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the swift development which the newcomer seemed everyday to exhibit ... his motiions and even his vocal sounds showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months he began to walk unassisted, whith falterings which another month was sufficient to remove...
''the next january gossips were mildly interested in the fact that "lavviny's black brat" had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months ... his facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well nigh preternatural intelligence. he was, however, excedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy, ... he was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, ... dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking menace ...
''when wilbur was a year and seven months old--in september of 1914--his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. he had grown as large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker ... at home he would pore diligently over the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while old whateley would instruct and catachise him through long, hushed afternoons ... wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year. he read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than formerly ... the aversion displayed toward him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. his occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine guardians ...
''it had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole whately place as violently as they hated and feared young wilbur personally ... about 1923, when wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, ... wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept . he was more and more hated and dreaded around dunwich because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door, ... he was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure ... his height had increased to more than seven feet, and shewed no signs of ceasing its development.
''the following winter brought an event no less strange than wilbur's first trip outside the dunwich region ... almost eight feet tall and carrying a cheap new valise from osborn's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in arkham ... he had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at it stout chain ... deep and terrible the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. then there rang out a scream from a wholly different throat--a scream as roused half the sleepers of arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterward.''
all of the excerpts from h.p.lovecrafts fiction and nonfiction were found in editions of his writings published by arkham house, delrey books or penguin books. except where noted.
