The call of Cthulhu
anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note.
Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour
of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which
he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast
had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose
religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its
deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders,
saying that it had come down from horribly ancient eons before ever the
world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were
certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or
_tornasuk_; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic
copy from an aged _angekok_ or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in
Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance
was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they
danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the
professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a
hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could tell,
it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing
now lying before the meeting.
These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled
members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an
oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshipers his men had arrested, he
besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken
down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then followed an exhaustive
comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both
detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase
common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What,
in substance, both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests
had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this--the
word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase
as chanted aloud:
"_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn._"
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among
his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had
told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
* * * * *
And now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse
related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshipers;
telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound
significance. It savored of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and
theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination
among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to
possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic
summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters
there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men,
were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen
upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more
terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and
children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its
incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller
ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling
chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added,
the people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile,
had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a
guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles
splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day
never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss
beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a
rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression
which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create.
At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in
sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of
bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible
far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals
when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through
the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant
even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused
point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy
worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on
unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod
before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil
repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were
legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a
huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters
whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner
earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before
D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the
wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and
to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to
keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe
of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps
the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the
shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by
Legrasse's men as they plowed on through the black morass toward the
red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar
to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible
to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury
and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by
howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those
nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now
and then the less organized ululations would cease, and from what
seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong
chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
"_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn._"
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came
suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one
fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony
of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the
face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotized
with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an
acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and
twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a
Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn
were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped
bonfire; in the center of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the
curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in
height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the
noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up
at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a center hung,
head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who
had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshipers
jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from
left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the
ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes
which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard
antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot
deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph
D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly
imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of
great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white
bulk beyond the remotest trees--but I suppose he had been hearing too
much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief
duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a
hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their
firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five
minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild
blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in
the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners,
whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows
of policemen. Five of the worshipers lay dead, and two severely
wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their
fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness,
the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and
mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes
and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape
Verde Islands, gave a coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.
But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something
far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and
ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprizing consistency
to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
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 man,
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, when the stars were ready, and the
secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture
could not extract. 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. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether
or not the others were precisely like him. 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."
* * * * *
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and
the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part
in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done
by Black-winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial
meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no