The Call of Cthulhu (Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston) by H

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2016-04-19 20:52:13 ued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle
had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses
from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a
large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of
the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculp-
tor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes
and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of
the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible to-
ward the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very
sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy
and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure,
and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from
some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name
instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration
and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a
few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered
if all the objects of the professor’s questioning felt as puzzled as did this
fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, ma-
nia, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have
employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and
the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide
in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shock-
ing cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South
America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A
despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white
robes en masse for some “glorious fulfillment” which never arrives, whilst
items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end
of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report
ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes
bothersome at this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical
Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland, too, is full
of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot
hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926.
And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a
miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange paral-
lelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all
told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with
which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had
known of the older matters mentioned by the professor. Open / Comment

2016-04-19 20:51:46 whom he learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was
dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he
spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly
dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked
or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional
frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must
be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his
dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably
a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy. His temperature,
oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was
otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly
ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and
completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the
night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to
his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery,
and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless
and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of
the scattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact,
that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account
for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those
descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that
in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems,
had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst
nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking
for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions
for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have been var-
ied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any
ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original corre-
spondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really
significant digest. Average people in society and business—New England’s
traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely negative result,
though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear
here and there, always between March 23rd and April 2nd—the period of
young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though
four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange land-
scapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and
I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare
notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler
of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I contin Open / Comment

2016-04-19 20:51:26 which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verba-
tim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole
conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He
said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities;
and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played
upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There
had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable
felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been
keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of
great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping
with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered
the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come
a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could
transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost
unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and dis-
turbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minute-
ness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the
youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes,
when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old
age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyph-
ics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place
to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange
cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises
of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership
in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult
or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future
reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the
manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related
startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some ter-
rible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or
intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscrib-
able save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those
rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.
On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and
inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure
sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He
had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and
had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium.
My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept
close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, Open / Comment

2016-04-19 20:51:13 a dragon, and a human caricature, 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. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion
of a Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press
cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretense to lit-
erary 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. This manuscript was divided into two sections, the
first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox,
7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspec-
tor John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A.A.S.
Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers
were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of differ-
ent persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines
(notably W. Scott Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest com-
ments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to
passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s
Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cut-
tings largely alluded to outr´e mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly
or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It
appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and
excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay
bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the
name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized him as the
youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had lat-
terly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and
living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was
a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from
childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he
was in the habit of relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”,
but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely
“queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually
from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes
from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its
conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculp-
tor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in
identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted
manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed
some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet im-
plied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, Open / Comment

2016-04-19 20:50:57 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 Semitic
Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor An-
gell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had
frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his
passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest
was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had
been stricken whilst returning from the Newport 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. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded
after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the
brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the
end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I
am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
As my grand-uncle’s 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.
Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the Ameri-
can Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly
puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had
been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the
personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed
I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by
a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of
the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings
which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the
most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor
responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.
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; for although the vagaries of
cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that
cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some
kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory,
despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed
in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest
affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial
intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its
nature. 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 some-
what extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, Open / Comment

2016-04-19 20:50:33 Chapter 1
The Horror in Clay
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . con-
sciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long
since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms
of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory
and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and
kinds . . . ”
— Algernon Blackwood
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have
hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not
masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the
single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and
maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of
truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—
in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I
hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I
shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the
professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that
he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him. Open / Comment

2016-04-19 20:50:15 The Call of Cthulhu
(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
by H. P. Lovecraft Open / Comment