opening statement with unexplained sound

"Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them." ( full text at the lovecraft archive )

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

 

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preface to stellification

 

"the climax? what plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? i have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. ...lest you think me a biased witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. i will quote the following account of the star nova persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, professor garrett p. serviss: ..."

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

 

''the lectures gave me an opportunity to explore a feature of renaissance literature which has probably struck every serious student as puzzling at one time or another: namely, the extraordinary prominence of astronomical imagery. that the stars were important astrologically is at best a partial explanation, i am more concerned here with the impact of astronomical discoveries--particularly their implications for stellification, or translation to the stars.

''renaissance astronomical imagery is often seen as no more than a literary repercussion of copernicus, just as stellification is dismissed as hyperbolic flattery. but for some time i have felt sure that other factors were involved. in the renaissance, purely objective science hardly existed. ... seventeenth century culture was both religious and materialistic. far from science replacing religion, the literature of the period seems to show a great variety of negotiated reconciliations of the two. ... meanwhile, an urge to survive materially after death is squared with new scientific information, there are extreme swings of opinion, strange temporary solutions.''

alastair fowler, times purpled masquers.

 

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opening statement purring

"it is said that in ulthar, which lies beyond the river skai, no man may kill a cat; and this i can verily believe as i gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. for the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. he is the soul of antique aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in meroë and ophir. he is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister africa. the sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten."
h.p.lovecraft, the cats of ulther.

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opening statement written on brick cylinders

 

other sarnath near benares-varanasi

"there is in the land of mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which no stream flows. ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of sarnath, but sarnath stands there no more. it is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of sarnath came to the land of mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the grey stone city of ib, which was old as the lake itself, ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the doom that came to sarnath.

 

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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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