potent pelf

 

 

hound from the pit

"st. john and i had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui ... it was this frightful emotional need 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. ...

 

"by what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible holland churchyard ? i think it was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.

 

"i remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, ... much--amazingly much--was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. the skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and it's long, firm teeth and it's eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own.

 

"in the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. it was the oddly conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, or a sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in an antique oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade.

 

"the expression of it's features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence. around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a makers seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

 

"immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. ... we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden necronomicon of the mad arab abdul alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible leng, in central asia. ... we read much in alhazred's necronomicon about it's properties, and about the relation of the ghost's soul to the object's it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read. ... then terror came."

 

h.p.lovecraft, the hound.

 

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lullaby for cthulhu

sandiego filk-cultist

"they worshipped 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.

 

"this was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of r'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. some day he would call, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."

 

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

 

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opening quest

 

"when age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when those things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away for ever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world's dreams had fled."

h.p.lovecraft, azathoth.

 

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ghoul sighting

a troop of ghouls pay visit to a house in the vale of arbroath.

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zenig the serious aphoratean

mr. zenig at mister.
''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."

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

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more batrachian than ichthyic

strange craftsmanship of purmundus via notcothulhu.

'' 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.

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landscape piece

illumined trees via notcothulhu.

''the scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain.
''beyond the scarred trunks in the background illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw full daylight.
''and nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, i could trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.''
h.p.lovecraft, the lurking fear.

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