The call of Cthulhu

The CALL of CTHULHU

By H.P. LOVECRAFT

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales, February 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


    "Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
    survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when ...
    consciousness 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    since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ...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._


[Illustration: "The ring of worshipers moved in endless bacchanale
between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire."][1]

[Footnote 1: Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland
Thurston, of Boston.]




                       _1. The Horror in Clay._

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 eons 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.

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
Angell 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 granduncle'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 American Archeological Society, but there was one box which I
found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing
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.