where the blighted shadows fall

''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.

freakish curvatures

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.''

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

mystery attracts mystery

''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.

idols of ibid

polychrome  idol of  st. 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; ...

in st.ibid we trust.

'' 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 ...


fruitarian cult statues of st.ibid.

'' 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 ...

sanctuary of st.ibid.

'' 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 ...

holy water bottle of st.ibid.

'' 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.

vacant pedestals

more towering stone at notcothulhu.

 ''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.

grey jenkin

more rumors at ronapondick.


''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.

dream waves

''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.''

h.p.lovecraft, beyond the wall of sleep.

nameless mesostic

''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

 the dreaded mesostomaticon of euph0r1a.

dream machine

''  "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." ''

h.p.lovecraft, from beyond.

apotropaic music

'' 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. ''

 h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.