which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record | The Call of Cthulhu (Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston) by H

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,