Supplemental
Material for Mary
Shelley’s
Frankenstein
1
Table of Contents
The Romantic Period: “The Gothic”
3-5
The Romantic Period: “The Satanic and Byronic Hero”
6-8
The Myth of Prometheus
9-10
“Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain”
By: Jessica Mitford
11-15
“The Call of Cthulhu”
H.P. Lovecraft
16-35
“Herbert West – Reanimator”
36-55
2
The Gothic begins with later-eighteenth-century writers' turn to the past; in the
context of the Romantic period, the Gothic is, then, a type of imitation
medievalism. When it was launched in the later eighteenth century, The
Gothic featured accounts of terrifying experiences in ancient castles —
experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret
passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody
hands, ghosts, graveyards, and the rest. By extension, it came
to designate the macabre, mysterious, fantastic, supernatural,
and, again, the terrifying, especially the pleasurably
terrifying, in literature more generally. Closer to the present,
one sees the Gothic pervading Victorian literature (for
example, in the novels of Dickens and the Brontës),
American fiction (from Poe and Hawthorne through
Faulkner), and of course the films, television, and videos of
our own (in this respect, not-so-modern) culture.
The Gothic revival, which appeared in English gardens and architecture before
it got into literature, was the work of a handful of visionaries, the most
important of whom was Horace Walpole (1717–1797), novelist, letter writer,
and son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. In the 1740s Horace
Walpole purchased Strawberry Hill, an estate on the Thames near London,
and set about remodeling it in what he called "Gothick" style, adding towers,
turrets, battlements, arched doors, windows, and ornaments of every
description, creating a kind of spurious medieval architecture that survives
today mainly in churches, military academies, and university buildings. The
project was extremely influential, as people came from all over to see
Strawberry Hill and returned to Gothicize their own houses.
When the Gothic made its appearance in literature, Walpole was again a chief
initiator, publishing The Castle of Otranto (1764), a short novel in which the
ingredients are a haunted castle, a Byronic villain (before Byron's time — and
the villain's name is Manfred!), mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, a
moaning ancestral portrait, a damsel in distress, and, as the Oxford Companion
to English Literature puts it, "violent emotions of terror, anguish, and love."
The work was tremendously popular, and imitations followed in such numbers
3
that the Gothic novel (or romance) was probably the commonest type of
fiction in England for the next half century. It is noteworthy in this period that
the best-selling author of the genre (Ann Radcliffe), the author of its most
enduring novel (Mary Shelley), and the author of its most effective sendup
(Jane Austen) were all women.
This topic offers extracts from some of the most
frequently mentioned works in the Gothic mode:
Walpole's Otranto as the initiating prototype; William
Beckford's Vathek (1786), which is "oriental" rather than
medieval but similarly blends cruelty, terror, and
eroticism; two extremely popular works by the "Queen of
Terror," Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest
(1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew
Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796), involving seduction,
incestuous rape, matricide and other murders, and
diabolism; and two works of 1818 poking fun at the bythen well-established tradition, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (which refers
specifically to the two Radcliffe novels just mentioned) and Thomas Love
Peacock's Nightmare Abbey.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was inspired, as Shelley explains in her
introduction to the edition of 1831, by a
communal reading of German ghost stories
with her husband and Byron during bad
weather on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Frankenstein is the single most important
product of this Gothic tradition, but it
considerably transcends its sources. Its
numerous thematic resonances relate to
science, poetry, psychology, alienation,
politics, education, family relationships, and
much else. Even so, one cannot imagine a
more archetypically Gothic circumstance than
the secret creation of an eight-foot-tall
monster out of separate body parts collected
from charnel houses; some of Victor
Frankenstein's most extravagant rhetoric in
the novel almost exactly reproduces the tone,
and even some of the words, of the extract
4
given here describing Isabella's distress in Otranto — as in this passage
expressing Victor's feelings of horror when Justine is condemned for the
murder of his brother William:
My own agitation and anguish was extreme during the whole trial. I believed
in her innocence; I knew it. Could the daemon, who had (I did not for a minute
doubt) murdered my brother, also in his hellish sport have betrayed the
innocent to death and ignominy? I could not sustain the horror of my situation;
and when I perceived that the popular voice, and the countenances of the
judges, had already condemned my unhappy victim, I rushed out of the court
in agony. The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by
innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forego
their hold. . . .
I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. I had before experienced
sensations of horror; and I have endeavoured to bestow upon them adequate
expressions, but words cannot convey an idea of the heart-sickening despair
that I then endured. . . . (volume 1, chapter 7)
More pervasive signs of Gothic influence show up in some of the most
frequently read Romantic poems — for example, the account of the skeleton
ship and the crew's reaction ("A flash of joy . . . And horror follows") in
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (NAEL 8, 2.430); the
atmosphere, setting, and fragmentary plot of witchery and seduction in
Coleridge's Christabel (NAEL 8, 2.449–64); the initial scene ("a Gothic
gallery") and most of the rest of Byron's Manfred (NAEL 8, 2.636–69); and the
medievalism and several details of the plot of Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes
(NAEL 8, 2.888–98), including Porphyro's invasion of Madeline's bedroom,
which, while the poem is always at some level an idealized tale of young love,
has obvious connections with the predatory overtones of our extracts from
both Udolpho and The Monk.
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th Edition
5
Not until the age of the American and French
Revolutions, more than a century after Milton wrote
Paradise Lost, did readers begin to sympathize with
Satan in the war between Heaven and Hell, admiring
him as the archrebel who had taken on no less an
antagonist than Omnipotence itself, and even
declaring him the true hero of the poem. In his ironic
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (NAEL 8, 2.111–20),
Blake claimed that Milton had unconsciously, but
justly, sided with the Devil (representing rebellious
energy) against Jehovah (representing oppressive
limitation). Lecturing in 1818 on the history of
English poetry, Hazlitt named Satan as “the most heroic subject that ever was
chosen for a poem” and implied that the rebel angel’s Heaven-defying
resistance was the mirror image of Milton’s own rebellion against political
tyranny. A year later, Percy Shelley maintained that Satan is the moral
superior to Milton’s tyrannical God, but he admitted that Satan’s greatness of
character is flawed by vengefulness and pride.
It was precisely this aspect of flawed grandeur,
however, that made Satan so attractive a model for
Shelley’s friend Byron in his projects of personal
myth-making. The more immediate precedents of the
Byronic hero—a figure that Byron uses for purposes
both of self-revelation and of self-concealment—were
the protagonists of some of the Gothic novels of the
later eighteenth century. Examples are Manfred, the
ominous hero-villain of Horace Walpole’s The Castle
of Otranto (1764) (NAEL 8, 2.579–82) and the
brooding, guilt-haunted monk Schedoni of Ann
Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), who each embody traits of Milton’s Satan.
Byron identified another alter ego in the towering historical figure of
Napoleon Bonaparte, who to the contemporary imagination combined, in
Satan’s manner, moral culpability with awe-inspiring power and grandeur.
Between 1795, when Napoleon took command of the armies of France, and
1815, when defeat at Waterloo banished him from Europe to his final exile,
patriotic supporters of Britain’s war effort represented Napoleon as an
infernal, blood-thirsty monster. These demonizing representations frequently
alluded to the example of Milton’s “enemy of mankind,” as William
Wordsworth did in an 1809 sonnet, “Look now on that Adventurer,” and
George Cruikshank did in an 1815 cartoon depicting the colossus in exile on
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the tiny island of St. Helena. Satanizing Napoleon made for effective wartime
propaganda because it invoked an already established plot, a narrative of
inevitable downfall. Yet Byron’s complex response to the man, worked out
over the entire body of his work, yields a contrasting account of history—and
also, and in particular in the “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” he wrote
following Napoleon’s abdication, a contrasting account of Milton’s fallen
angel. To Byron, Napoleon represents both a figure of heroic aspiration and
someone who has been shamefully mastered by his own passions—both a
conqueror and, after Waterloo, a captive: Napoleon thus becomes as much the
occasion for psychological analysis as for moral condemnation. There was
more than a touch of self-projection in this account. (At a tongue-in-cheek
moment in canto 11 of Don Juan, Byron dubs himself “the grand Napoleon of
the realms of rhyme.”) The characteristic doubleness of the Byronic hero is
dramatized in the story of Napoleon’s venturesome rise and inglorious fall.
Byron first sketched out this hero with his SatanicGothic-Napoleonic lineage in 1812, in the opening
stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 1
(NAEL 8, 2.617–19). At this stage, he is rather
crudely depicted as a young man, prematurely sated
by sin, who wanders about in an attempt to escape
society and his own memories. Conrad, the hero of
The Corsair (1814), has become more isolated,
darker, more complex in his history and inner
conflict, and therefore more frightening and more
compelling to the reader. The hero of Lara (also
1814) is a finished product; he reappears two years later, with variations in
canto 3 of Childe Harold (see NAEL 8, 2.619–22, stanzas 2–16, and 2.627–28,
stanzas 52–55 ) and again the following year as the hero of Byron’s poetic
drama Manfred (NAEL 8, 2.636–69).
Early on, Coleridge recognized the disquieting
elements in the appeal of this hero of dark mystery,
and in the Statesman's Manual (1816) warned against
it, but in vain. Immediately affecting the life, art, and
even philosophy of the nineteenth century, the
Byronic hero took on a life of his own. He became
the model for the behavior of avant-garde young men
and gave focus to the yearnings of emancipated
young women. And Byron was fated to discover that
the literary alter egos he had created could in turn
exert power over him: his social disgrace following
the breakup of his marriage in 1816 was declared by
Walter Scott to be a consequence of how the poet had “Childe Harolded
himself, and outlawed himself, into too great a resemblance with the pictures
7
of his imagination.” Literary history demonstrates, similarly, that Byron could
at best participate in but not control the myth-making processes of Byronism.
Upstaging him, many others were determined to have a hand in the mythmaking. Byron had borrowed from late-eighteenth-century Gothic novels to
create his persona but, in the nineteenth century, the Byronic hero would be
absorbed back into the Gothic tradition. The process began in 1816 with
Glenarvon, a roman à clef whose author, Lady Caroline Lamb, mischievously
recycled elements of Byron’s own poems—in particular The Giaour—to tell
the story of her failed love affair with the poet and to portray him as a
monstrous, supernaturally powerful seducer. It continued three years later with
a novella published by the poet’s physician and traveling companion John
Polidori that would clinch the association of Byron and the evil undead. These
works and the novels, plays, and even operas they spawned granted Byron an
eerie afterlife, as the Gothic tradition’s vampire in chief.
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th Edition
8
The Myth of Prometheus
Prometheus was a Titan from Greek myth, born from the union of the Titan Iapetus and
the Nymph Asia. He was one of four children born to the pair. The siblings of
Prometheus included Menoetius, Atlas and Epimetheus, all of them Titans. The name
Prometheus means foresight, his brother's name Epimetheus means hindsight.
Their father, Iapetus led the revolt against the Gods, his children Menoetius and Atlas
joined with him, while his other two sons, Prometheus and Epimetheus sided with the
Gods. Menoetius was killed during the revolt and Atlas was given the weight of the world
to bear for his actions during the revolt.
According to the myths, a horrendous headache overcame Zeus and no healer of the
realm was able to help the Lord of the Gods. Prometheus came to him and declared that
he knew how to heal Zeus. Taking a rock from the ground Prometheus proceeded to hit
Zeus in the head with it. From out of Zeus' head popped the Goddess Athena, and with
her emergence Zeus' headache disappeared.
Prometheus and Epimetheus journeyed to Earth from Olympus. They ventured to the
Greek province of Boitia and made clay figures. Athena took the figures and breathed life
into them—the figures that Prometheus had created became Man and honored him. The
figures that his brother Epimetheus had created became the beasts, which turned and
attacked him.
Zeus was angered by the brothers’ actions: he forbade the pair from teaching Man the
ways of civilization, however, Athena chose to cross Zeus and taught Prometheus so that
he might teach Man.
For their actions, Zeus demanded a sacrifice from Man to the Gods to show that they
were obedient and worshipful. Man went to Prometheus to inquire which parts of the
animals for sacrifice belonged to Zeus and the Gods, and which parts belonged to Man.
At Prometheus’ instructions, Man sacrificed an ox and placed the sacrifice into two bags.
In the first bag the bones were placed with the fat from the ox placed on top to conceal
them. In the second bag the meat was placed with the intestines on top to conceal them as
well. Prometheus called for Zeus to choose which portion of the sacrifice he and the other
Gods demanded. Zeus chose the bag with the fat on top, giving the Gods the bones of the
ox as their sacrifice.
Zeus was angered by the actions of Man and Prometheus, so he forbade the Gods to give
fire to Man. Prometheus was upset with Zeus' proclamation and was determined to bring
fire to Man, but Zeus had guarded the entrance to Olympus. Athena told Prometheus
about an unguarded back entrance to Olympus where he would be able to enter with ease.
Prometheus snuck into Olympus at night through the back entrance that Athena had told
9
him of. He made his way to the Chariot of the Sun and lit a torch from the fires that
burned there. Extinguishing the torch, Prometheus carried the still hot coals down the
mountain in a pithy fennel stalk to prevent being seen. Upon reaching the lands of Men,
Prometheus gave to them the coals, breaking Zeus' order by giving fire to Man.
Zeus was extremely angered by Prometheus' actions, as he had not wanted fire to be
given to Man, so Zeus set out to make a trap for Prometheus. Zeus gathered the gifts of
the Gods and created Pandora, the world’s first woman, and her box, into which he
placed all the horrors of the world. Pandora was sent to Prometheus as a gift from Zeus
himself.
Prometheus saw the curse that Pandora and her box carried, so he refused the gift and
gave it instead to his brother Epimetheus who opened the box and released the chained
horrors upon the world.
Zeus was personally affronted by Prometheus’ actions: he had refused a gift from the
Lord of the Gods himself. At Zeus’ order Prometheus was chained to a rock in the
Caucasus Mountains where his torture was to be carried out. Every day a great Eagle
would come to Prometheus and eat his liver, leaving only at nightfall when the liver
would begin to grow back once more, only to repeat the process again the next day.
Zeus offered to free Prometheus if he would tell the secret of the prophecy that told of the
dethroning of Zeus one day, but Prometheus refused. The mother of Prometheus, the
Nymph Asia, also had the gift of Foresight and went to Zeus and told him the secret of
the prophecy. The prophecy told that the offspring of Zeus and the Nymph Clymene
would one day rise up and destroy Zeus and Gods.
Zeus sent Heracles to free Prometheus from the rock, but required that Prometheus still
be bound to the rock for the rest of eternity. A link of the chain he had been bound with
was set with a chip of the rock and Prometheus was required to carry it with him always.
Men also created rings with stones and gems set into them to commiserate with him and
to honor Prometheus for the actions he had taken on their behalf.
Throughout history, Prometheus has symbolized unyielding strength that resists
oppression.
10
Jessica Mitford
Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain
Content Advisory: I always warn students about this essay because it contains detailed descriptions of what
happens to a dead body when it is embalmed and prepared for viewing. If you are sensitve about this sort of
thing, or if you have lost a loved one recently, or if for whatever reason you don't feel up to analyzing this
particular essay, you may choose to opt out. There will be other opportunities throughout the semester to
recover the lost points.
“The most famous (or infamous) thing Jessica Mitford wrote is The American Way of Death, a critique
of the funeral industry. In this selection from the book, Mitford analyzes the twin processes of
embalming and restoring a corpse, the practices she finds most objectionable. You may need a stable
stomach to enjoy the selection, but in it you’ll find a clear, painstaking process analysis, written with
masterly style and outrageous wit. (For those who want to know, Mitford herself was cremated after
death.)”
Kennedy, X.J., ed. The Bedford Reader, 8th edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. Boston: 2003
The drama begins to unfold with the arrival of the corpse at the mortuary. Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he
would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed,
sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed-transformed
from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture. This process is known in the trade as embalming and
restorative art, and is so universally employed in the United States and Canada that the funeral director does it
routinely, without consulting corpse or kin. He regards as eccentric those few who are hardy enough to suggest
that it might be dispensed with. Yet no law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it
dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even of personal daintiness. In no part of the world but in
Northern America is it widely used. The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse presentable for viewing
in a suitably costly container; and here too the funeral director routinely, without first consulting the family,
prepares the body for public display.
Is all this legal? The processes to which a dead body may be subjected are after all to some extent
circumscribed by law. In most states, for instance, the signature of next of kin must be obtained before an
autopsy may be performed, before the deceased may be cremated, before the body may be turned over to a
medical school for research purposes; or such provision must be made in the decedent's will. In the case of
embalming, no such permission is required nor is it ever sought. A textbook, The Principles and Practices of
Embalming, comments on this: "There is some question regarding the legality of much that is done within the
preparation room." The author points out that it would be most unusual for a responsible member of a bereaved
family to instruct the mortician, in so many words, to "embalm" the body of a deceased relative. The very term
"embalming" is so seldom used that the mortician must reply upon custom in the matter. The author concludes
that unless the family specifies otherwise, the act of entrusting the body to the care of a funeral establishment
carries with it an implied permission to go ahead and embalm.
Embalming is indeed a most extraordinary procedure, and one must wonder at the docility of Americans who
each year pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its perpetuation, blissfully ignorant of what it is all about,
what is done, how it is done. Not one in ten thousand has any idea of what actually takes place. Books on the
subject are extremely hard to come by. They are not found in most libraries or bookshops.
11
In an era when huge television audiences watch surgical operations in the comfort of their living rooms, when,
thanks to the animated cartoon, the geography of the digestive system has become familiar territory even to the
nursery school set, in a land where the satisfaction of curiosity about almost all matters is a national pastime,
the secrecy surrounding embalming can, surely, hardly be attributed to the inherent gruesomeness of the
subject. Custom in this regard has within this century suffered a complete reversal. In the early days of
American embalming, when it was performed in the home of the deceased, it was almost mandatory for some
relative to stay by the embalmer's side and witness the procedure. Today, family members who might wish to
be in attendance would certainly be dissuaded by the funeral director. All others, except apprentices, are
excluded by law from the preparation room.
A close look at what does actually take place may explain a large measure of the undertaker's intractable
reticence concerning a procedure that has become his major raison d'etre. Is it possible he fears that public
information about embalming might lead patrons to wonder if they really want this service? If the funeral men
are loath to discuss the subject outside the trade, the reader may, understandably, be equally loath to go on
reading at this point. For those who have the stomach for it, let us part the formaldehyde curtain. . . .
The body is first laid out in the undertaker's morgue-or rather, Mr. Jones is reposing in the preparation room-to
be readied to bid the world farewell.
The preparation room in any of the better funeral establishments has the tiled and sterile look of a surgery, and
indeed the embalmer-restorative artist who does his chores there is beginning to adopt the term
"dermasurgeon" (appropriately corrupted by some mortician-writers as "demi-surgeon") to describe his calling.
His equipment, consisting of scalpels, scissors, augers, forceps, clamps, needles, pumps, tubes, bowls and
basins, is crudely imitative of the surgeon's, as is his technique, acquired in a nine- or twelve-month post-highschool course in an embalming school. He is supplied by an advanced chemical industry with a bewildering
array of fluids, sprays, pastes, oils, powders, creams, to fix or soften tissue, shrink or distend it as needed, dry
it here, restore the moisture there. There are cosmetics, waxes and paints to fill and cover features, even plaster
of Paris to replace entire limbs. There are ingenious aids to prop and stabilize the cadaver: a Vari-Pose Head
Rest, the Edwards Arm and Hand Positioner, the Repose Block (to support the shoulders during embalming),
and the Throop Foot Positioner, which resembles old-fashioned stocks.
Mr. John H. Eckels, president of the Eckels College of Mortuary Science, thus describes the first part of the
embalming procedure: "In the hands of a skilled practitioner, this work may be done in a comparatively short
time and without mutilating the body other than by slight incision - so slight that it scarcely would cause
serious inconvenience if made upon a living person. It is necessary to remove the blood, and doing this not
only helps in the disinfecting, but removes the principal cause of disfigurements due to discoloration."
Another textbook discusses the all-important time element: "The earlier this is done, the better, for every hour
that elapses between death and embalming will add to the problems and complications encountered. . . ." Just
how soon should one get to embalming? The author tells us, "On the basis of such scanty information made
available to this profession through its rudimentary and haphazard system of technical research, we must
conclude the best results are to be obtained if the subject is embalmed before life is completely extinct - that is,
before cellular death has occurred. In the average case, this would mean within an hour after somatic death."
For those who feel there is something a little rudimentary, not to say haphazard, about this advice, a
comforting thought is offered by another writer. Speaking of fears entertained in early days of premature
burial, he points out, "One of the effects of embalming by chemical injection, however, has been to dispel fears
of live burial." How true; once the blood is removed, the chances of live burial are indeed remote.
To return to Mr. Jones, the blood is drained out through the veins and replaced with embalming fluid pumped
through the arteries. As noted in The Principles and Practices of Embalming, "every operator has a favorite
injection and drainage point - a fact which becomes a handicap only if he fails or refuses to forsake his
12
favorites when conditions demand it." Typical favorites are the carotid artery, femoral artery, jugular vein,
subclavian vein. There are various choices of embalming fluids. If Flextone is used, it will produce a "mild,
flexible rigidity. The skin retains a velvety softness, the tissues are rubbery and pliable. Ideal for women and
children." It may be blended with B. and G. Products Company's Lyf-Lyk tint, which is guaranteed to
reproduce "nature's own skin texture . . . the velvety appearance of living tissue." Suntone comes in three
separate tints: Suntan; Special Cosmetic Tint, a pink shade "especially indicated for young female subjects";
and Regular Cosmetic Tint, moderately pink.
About three to six gallons of dyed and perfumed solution of formaldehyde, glycerin, borax, phenol, alcohol
and water is soon circulating through Mr. Jones, whose mouth has been sewn together with a "needle directed
upward between the upper lip and gum and brought out through the left nostril," with the corners raised
slightly "for a more pleasant expression. If he should be bucktoothed, his teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and
coated with colorless nail polish. His eyes, meanwhile, are closed with flesh-tinted eye caps and eye cement.
The next step is to have at Mr. Jones with a thing called a trocar. This is a long, hollow needle attached to a
tube. It is jabbed into the abdomen, poked around the entrails and chest cavity, the contents of which are
pumped out and replaced with "cavity fluid." This done, and the hole in the abdomen sewn up, Mr. Jones's face
is heavily creamed (to protect the skin from burns which may be caused by leakage of the chemicals), and he is
covered with a sheet and left unmolested for a while. But not for long - there is more, much more, in store for
him. He has been embalmed, but not yet restored, and the best time to start the restorative work is eight to ten
hours after embalming, when the tissues have become firm and dry.
The object of all this attention to the corpse, it must be remembered, is to make it presentable for viewing in an
attitude of healthy repose. "Our customs require the presentation of our dead in semblance of normality . . .
unmarred by the ravages of illness, disease or mutilation," says Mr. J. Sheridan Mayer in his Restorative Art.
This is rather a large order since few people die in full bloom of health, unravaged by illness and unmarked by
some disfigurement. The funeral industry is equal to the challenge: "In some cases the gruesome appearance of
a mutilated or disease-ridden subject may be quite discouraging. The task of restoration may seem impossible
and shake the confidence of the embalmer. This is the time for intestinal fortitude and determination. Once the
formative work is begun and affected tissues are cleaned or removed, all doubts of success vanish. It is
surprising and gratifying to discover the results which may be obtained."
The embalmer, having allowed an appropriate interval of elapse, returns to the attack, but now he brings into
play the skill and equipment of sculptor and cosmetician. Is a hand missing? Casting one in plaster of Paris is a
simple matter. "For replacement purposes, only a cast of the back of the hand is necessary; this is within the
ability of the average operator and is quite adequate." If a lip or two, a nose or an ear should be missing, the
embalmer has at hand a variety of restorative waxes with which to model replacements. Pores and skin texture
are simulated by stippling with a little brush, and over this cosmetics are laid on. Head off? Decapitation cases
are rather routinely handled. Ragged edges are trimmed, and head joined to torso with a series of splints, wires
and sutures. It is a good idea to have a little something at the neck - a scarf or high collar - when time for
viewing comes. Swollen mouth? Cut out tissue as needed from inside the lips. If too much is removed, the
surface contour can easily be restored by padding with cotton. Swollen necks and cheeks are reduced by
removing tissue through vertical incisions made down each side of the neck. "When the deceased is casketed,
the pillow will hide the suture incisions . . . as an extra precaution against leakage, the suture may be painted
with liquid sealer."
The opposite condition is more likely to present itself - that of emaciation. His hypodermic syringe now loaded
with massage cream, the embalmer seeks out and fills the hollowed and sunken areas by injection. In this
procedure the backs of the hands and fingers and the under-chin area should not be neglected.
Positioning the lips is a problem that recurrently challenges the ingenuity of the embalmer. Closed too tightly,
they tend to give a stern, even disapproving expression. Ideally, embalmers feel, the lips should give the
13
impression of being ever so slightly parted, the upper lip protruding slightly for a more youthful appearance.
This takes some engineering, however, as the lips tend to drift apart. Lip drift can sometimes be remedied by
pushing one or two straight pins through the inner margin oft he lower lip and then inserting them between the
two upper teeth. If Mr. Jones happens to have no teeth, the pins can just as easily be anchored in his Armstrong
Face Former and Denture Replacer. Another method to maintain lip closure is to dislocate the lower jaw,
which is then held in its new position by a wire run through holes which have been drilled through the upper
and lower jaws at the midline. As the French are fond of saying, il faut souffrir pour etre belle. (“You have to
suffer to be beautiful.”)
If Mr. Jones has died of jaundice, the embalming fluid will very likely turn him green. Does this deter the
embalmer? Not if he has intestinal fortitude. Masking pastes and cosmetics are heavily laid on, burial garments
and casket interiors color-correlated with particular care, and Jones is displayed beneath rose-colored lights.
Friends will say "How well he looks." Death by carbon monoxide, on the other hand, can be rather a good
thing from the embalmer's viewpoint: "One advantage is the fact that this type of discoloration is an
exaggerated form of a natural pink coloration." This is nice because the healthy glow is already present and
needs little attention.
The patching and filling completed, Mr. Jones is now shaved, washed and dressed. Cream-based cosmetic,
available in pink, flesh, suntan, brunette, and blond, is applied to his hands and face, his hair is shampooed and
combed (and, in the case of Mrs. Jones, set), his hands manicured. For the horny-handed son of toil and special
care must be taken; cream should be applied to remove ingrained grime, and the nails cleaned. "If he were not
in the habit of having them manicured in life, trimming and shaping is advised for better appearance - never
questioned by kin."
Jones is now ready for casketing (this is the present participle verb of "to casket"). In this operation his right
shoulder should be depressed slightly "to turn the body a bit to the right and soften the appearance of lying flat
on the back." Positioning the hands is a matter of importance, and special rubber positioning blocks may be
used. The hands should be cupped slightly for a more lifelike, relaxed appearance. Proper placement of the
body requires a delicate sense of balance. It should lie as high as possible in the casket, yet not so high that the
lid, when lowered, will hit the nose. On the other hand, we are cautioned, placing the body too low "creates the
impression that the body is in a box."
Jones is next wheeled into the appointed slumber room where a few last touches may be added-his favorite
pipe placed in his hand or, if he was a great reader, a book propped into position. (In the case of little Master
Jones a Teddy bear may be clutched.) Here he will hold open house for a few days, visiting hours 10 A.M. to 9
P.M.
All now being in readiness, the funeral director calls a staff conference to make sure that each assistant knows
his precise duties. Mr. Wilber Kriege writes: "This makes your staff feel that they are part of the team, with a
definite assignment that must be properly carried out if the whole plan is to succeed. You never heard of a
football coach who failed to talk to his entire team before they go on the field. They have drilled on the plays
they are to execute for hours and days, and yet the successful coach knows the importance of making even the
bench-warming third-string substitute feel that he is important if the game is to be won." The winning of this
game is predicated upon glass-smooth handling of the logistics. The funeral director has notified the
pallbearers whose names were furnished by the family, has arranged for the presence of clergyman, organist,
and soloist, has provided transportation for everybody, has organized and listed the flowers sent by friends. In
Psychology of Funeral Service Mr. Edward A. Martin points out: "He may not always do as much as the
family thinks he is doing, but it is his helpful guidance that they appreciate in knowing they are proceeding as
they should . . . . The important thing is how well his services can be used to make the family believe they are
giving unlimited expression to their own sentiment."
The religious service may be held in a church or in the chapel of the funeral home; the funeral director vastly
14
prefers the latter arrangement, for not only is it more convenient for him but it affords him the opportunity to
show off his beautiful facilities to the gathered mourners. After the clergyman has had his say, the mourners
queue up to file past the casket for a last look at the deceased. The family is never asked whether they want an
open-casket ceremony; in the absence of their instruction to the contrary, this is taken for granted.
Consequently well over 90 per cent of all American funerals feature the open casket - a custom unknown in
other parts of the world. Foreigners are astonished by it. An English woman living in San Francisco described
her reaction in a letter to the writer:
I myself have attended only one funeral here - that of an elderly fellow worker of mine. After the service I
could not understand why everyone was walking towards the coffin (sorry, I mean casket), but thought I had
better follow the crowd. It shook me rigid to get there and find the casket open and poor old Oscar lying there
in his brown tweed suit, wearing a suntan makeup and just the wrong shade of lipstick. If I had not been
extremely fond of the old boy, I have a horrible feeling that I might have giggled. Then and there I decided that
I could never face another American funeral - even dead.
The casket (which has been resting throughout the service on a Classic Beauty Ultra Metal Casket Bier) is now
transferred by a hydraulically operated device called Porto-Lift to a balloon-tired, Glide Easy casket carriage,
which will wheel it to yet another conveyance, the Cadillac Funeral Coach. This may be lavender, cream, light
green-anything but black. Interiors, of course, are color-correlated, "for the man who cannot stop short of
perfection."
At graveside, the casket is lowered into the earth. This office, once the prerogative of friends of the deceased,
is now performed by a patented mechanical lowering device. A "Lifetime Green" artificial grass mat is at the
ready to conceal the sere earth, and overhead, to conceal the sky, is a portable Steril Chapel Tent ("resists the
intense heat and humidity of summer and terrific storms of winter . . . available in Silver Grey, Rose or
Evergreen"). Now is the time for the ritual scattering of earth over the coffin, as the solemn words, "earth to
earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" are pronounced by the officiating cleric. This can boldly be accomplished
"with a mere flick of the wrist with the Gordon Leak-Proof Earth Dispenser. No grasping of a handful of dirt,
no soiled fingers. Simple, dignified, beautiful, reverent! The modern way!" The Gordon Earth Dispenser (at
$5) is of nickel-plated brass construction. It is not only "attractive to the eye and long wearing"; it is also "one
of the 'tools' for building better public relations" if presented as "an appropriate non-commercial gift" to the
clergyman. It is shaped something like a saltshaker.
Untouched by human hand, the coffin and the earth are now united. It is in the function of directing the
participants through this maze of gadgetry that the funeral director has assigned to himself his relatively new
role of "grief therapist." He has relieved the family of every detail, he has revamped the corpse to look like a
living doll, he has arranged for it to nap for a few days in a slumber room, he has put on a well-oiled
performance in which the concept of death played no part whatsoever - unless it was inconsiderately
mentioned by the clergyman who conducted the religious service. He has done everything in his power to
make the funeral a real pleasure for everybody concerned. He and his team have given their all to score an
upset victory over death.
Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death. Simon and Schuster. New York: 1963
15
The Call of Cthulhu
(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
by H. P. Lovecraft
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 . . . 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 ying 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, ashed 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 granduncle 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
16
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 American 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 _nd 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 somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an
octopus, 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 literary 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 Inspector 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 different
persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott
Elliot's Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies
and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source17
books as Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings
largely alluded to outré 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 latterly 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 sculptor abruptly asked
for the benefit of his host's archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the basrelief. 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 implied
kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my uncle
enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, 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 disturbed Professor
Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; 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 hieroglyphics 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
18
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 terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical senseimpacts uninscribable 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, 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 nightthoughts 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 skepticism 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 varied; but he must,
at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled
without a secretary. This original correspondence 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 landscapes, and in
one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
19
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 continued
to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant 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 sculptor'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 toward 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, mania, 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 shocking 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 dispatch 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 parallelisms 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.
20
Chapter 2
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse
The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so significant to
my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears,
Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the
unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as
“Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connection that it is small wonder he pursued
young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American
Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of
his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of
the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to
offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire
meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New
Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John
Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the
subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose
origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least
interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely
professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured
some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed
voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police
could not but realize that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and
infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart
from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing
was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help
them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created.
One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of
tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure
whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened
and archaic vistas. No recognized school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet
centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of
unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study,
was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It
represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face
was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and
long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural
malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of
the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up,
21
crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the
bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial
feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The
aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was
so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link
did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilization’s youth – or indeed to any other
time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black
stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or
mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite
a representation of half the world's expert learning in this _eld, could form the least notion of
even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something
horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old
and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the
Inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre
familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of
the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of
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 Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form
of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith
of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that
it had come down from horribly ancient aeons 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 so far
as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying
before the meeting.
This 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-worshippers his men had arrested,
he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the
diabolist Esquimaux. 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
Esquimaux 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.”
22
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 and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully
as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my
uncle attached profound significance. It savored of the wildest dreams of mythmaker 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 the New Orleans police a frantic summons
from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but goodnatured 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 fragment 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 tomtoms 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 pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of
forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused pointblank 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 batwinged 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.
23
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they
ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and 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 daemoniac 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 ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse
voices would rise in sing-song 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 centre 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 centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters
who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the
general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal 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 tree – 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 worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on
improvised stretchers bytheir 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
24
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 surprising
consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
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, 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 coherent account could
ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo
named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the
cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists
and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other
Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless
Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific.
They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them
when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had,
indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and
blood. They had shape – for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? – but that shape was not
made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the
sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived,
They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved
by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might
once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate
Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an
initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of
years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was
25
transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the
first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their
dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the
Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till
the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to
revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then
mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil,
with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then
the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy
themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile
the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow
forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then
something happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchers, had sunk
beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even
thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the highpriests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth
the black spirits of earth, moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors picked up in caverns
beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off
hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of
the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the
centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and
untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its
members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said
that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which
the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning
the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was
wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image,
and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more
than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by
the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant
mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those
accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the
image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's death it was returned to him and remains in his
possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to
the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
26
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts
must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a
sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swampfound image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the
precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans?
Professor Angell's instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently
natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect
way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my
uncle's expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course,
strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject
led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the
manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult
narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I
thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian
imitation of seventeenth century Breton Architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the
lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian
steeple in America, I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens
scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be
heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror
in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark
Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked
me my business without rising. Then I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my
uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason
for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to
draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the
dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced
his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake
with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing
except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his
hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing
of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made
clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the
weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the
damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone - whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong - and
hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: "Cthulhu
fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn." These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead
Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational
beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it
amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer
impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the
terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one.
The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never
27
like, but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him
amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of
personal fame from researches into its origin and connections. I visited New Orleans, talked with
Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned
such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for
some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a
detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was
on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make
me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as l wish it still
were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes
and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle's death was
far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming
with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood
and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of
secret methods and rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in
Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle
after encountering the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears?. I think Professor Angell died
because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he
did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.
28
Chapter 3
The Madness from the Sea
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a
mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which
I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an
Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau
which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the "Cthulhu
Cult", and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum
and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old
papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend had
wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous
stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was
disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous
significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as
follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow. One
Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths at
Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experience. Odd Idol
Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.
The Morrison Co.'s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this
morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled
but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N.Z., which was sighted April
12th in S. Latitude 34°21', W. Longitude 152°17', with one living and one dead
man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven
considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster
waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted,
was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition
and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man
was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about foot in height,
regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and
the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the
survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of
common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy
and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had
been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed
for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says,
29
was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March
1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49°51' W. Longitude 128°34', encountered
the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes.
Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the
strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with
a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.
The Emma's men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began
to sink from shots beneath the water-line they managed to heave alongside their
enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht's deck, and
being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their
particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were
killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to
navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any
reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised
and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the
ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly
reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock
chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to
manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd, From that time till
his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when
William Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death reveals no apparent cause,
and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin
report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil
reputation along the waterfront, It was owned by a curious group of half-castes
whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity;
and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March
1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent
reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty
will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every
effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done
hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it
started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it
had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order
back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on
which six of the Emma's crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive?
What had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult
in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was
this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so
carefully noted by my uncle?
March 1st – or February 28th according to the International Date Line – the earthquake
and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as
if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream
of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of
30
the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left
six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and
darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a
sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd - the date on
which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of
strange fever? What of all this - and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old
Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on
the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind
alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had
begun its siege of mankind's soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took
a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that
little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront
scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip
these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant
hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a
perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West
Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell
his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me
his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the viceadmiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney
Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish
head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at
Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship,
and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I
had noted in Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a
monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a
shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Old Ones; "They had come from the
stars, and had brought Their images with Them."
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to
visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reembarked at once for the Norwegian capital;
and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen's
address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name
of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as "Christiana." I made the
brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building
with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung th
disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings sea in 1925 had broken
him. He had told her no more than he told the public, but had left a long manuscript - of
"technical matters" as he said - written in English, evidently in order to guard her from the peril
of casual perusal. During a walk rough a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of
papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped
31
him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no
adequate cause the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at
rest; "accidentally" or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with her husband's
"technical matters" was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and
began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing - a naive sailor's effort at a
post-facto diary - and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to
transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew
why the sound the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped
my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing,
but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life
in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath
the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world
whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in
ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquakeborn tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's
dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert
on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking.
Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some
peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and
Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during
the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht
under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S.
Latitude 47°9', W. Longitude l23°43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy
Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme
terror - the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by
the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his
hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the
thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithfull to
come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God
knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon
great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all
that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men
were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have
guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven
monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer
image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mates frightened
description.
32
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it
when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells
only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to
anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I
mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful
dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and
loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt
the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and
clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The
very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out
from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those
crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first
shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite
than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the
others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched - vainly, as it proved - for some portable
souvenir to bear away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of
what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with
the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they
all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they
could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As
Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the
sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed
phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it
delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably
along the grotesque stone molding - that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after
all horizontal - and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very
softly and slowly, the acre-great lintel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was
balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his
fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this
phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of
matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a
positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and
actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it
slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising
from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he
heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still
when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity
through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
33
Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who
never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing
cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy,
such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or
stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox
raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the
stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had
failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of
years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if
there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Angstrom. Parker slipped as
the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat,
and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn't have been
there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen
reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped
down the slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for
the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between
wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that
indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel
shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme
cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid
greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency.
Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death
found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the
Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full
speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and
foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian
drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the
stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the
bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an
exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened
graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was
befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething
astern; where - God in heaven! - the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was
nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as
the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a
few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate
after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the
storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of
spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a
comets tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to
34
the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green,
bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue-the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of
Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife
must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the basrelief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine - this test of my
own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I
have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the
flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long.
As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him
since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the
spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idolcapped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his
black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows
the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams
in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not
and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put
caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
35
Herbert West – Reanimator
I
From The Dark
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme
terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was
engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than
seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University
Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments
fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is
broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is
only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical
school where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of
death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by
the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and
concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action
after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had
killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had
become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in
animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he soon saw that the perfection of his
process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became
clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would
require human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came
into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a
dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself -- the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan
Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his
theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all
life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend
believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues;
and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with
suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or
intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a
short period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to
find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated
failures on animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible.
He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood
immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so
36
carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop
to view the matter closely and reasoningly.
It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution
to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no
longer perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the
college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved
inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West
was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes,
and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch
Cemetery and the potter’s field. We finally decided on the potter’s field, because practically
every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West’s researches.
I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not
only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It
was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up
on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our
midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions
were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal
roamers, would soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a
chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of
science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college -materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes -- and provided spades and picks for
the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but
the apparatus was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance -even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the
boarding-house.
We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular
qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial
preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present.
Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable;
though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as
often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every
case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the
limited summer-school classes were held. In the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we
heard of an almost ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the
morning before in Summer’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or
embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after
midnight.
It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that
time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades
and oil dark lanterns, for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as
satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid
-- it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists -- and we
were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered, West
scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down
and hauled the contents out of the grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its
37
former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face
of our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down
the last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman
place beyond Meadow Hill.
On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene
lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently
unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type -- large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired - a sound animal without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the
simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though
the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had
always longed for -- a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready for the solution as prepared
according to the most careful calculations and theories for human use. The tension on our part
became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete
success, and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation.
Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the
space following death some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered
deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and
felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what
sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully
restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared the
materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a
vein of the body’s arm, immediately binding the incision securely.
The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his
stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically. After about threequarters of an hour without the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution
inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the
formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar,
and would have to fill it by dawn -- for although we had fixed a lock on the house, we wished to
shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even
approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent
laboratory, we left our silent guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of
a new solution; the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.
The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one
test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a
Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the
most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more
unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the
agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror
and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have been -- it is not in man to make
such sounds -- and without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery, both West
and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts,
and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we
stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance
of restraint -- just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.
38
We did not separate, but managed to get to West’s room, where we whispered with the gas up
until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for
investigation, so that we could sleep through the day -- classes being disregarded. But that
evening two items in the paper, wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The
old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we
could understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb a new
grave in the potter’s field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not
understand, for we had patted down the mould very carefully.
And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain
of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.
II
The Plague-Daemon
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the
halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most
recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of
Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in that time -- a horror known to me
alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.
West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of
Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments
leading toward the revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted small
animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan
Halsey; though West had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house
room, and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave in
the potter’s field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.
I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he
thought would to some extent restore life’s chemical and physical processes. It had ended
horribly -- in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought
nerves -- and West had never afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being
haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore
normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of the old house had
prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better if we could have known it was
underground.
After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of the born
scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the
use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so
overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr.
Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the
39
radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful
enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of
the supernormal -- almost diabolical -- power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he
was then -- and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has
had the mishap and West has vanished.
West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term in a
wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindiy dean in point of courtesy. He felt that
he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of
course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed
of the exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his
singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was
inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament.
Only greater maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the
"professor-doctor" type -- the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly,
conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden,
and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-souled characters,
whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their
intellectual sins -- sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and
every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his marvellous
scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and
nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse
worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate
daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.
And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus.
West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for additional work
at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon
the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed
frantically into public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past
management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials
without embalming were made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery
receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not
without effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation -- so many fresh
specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the
terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.
But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but
closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr.
Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill
with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent
hopelessness. Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he
seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue
and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but
because of this was even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines.
Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations,
he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one
night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened
40
its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into
an inertness from which nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough -- the hot
summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught before we incinerated the
thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.
The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr. Halsey
did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an
impressive wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy
Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had
surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and
spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though shaken by the death
of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious theories. Most of the
students went home, or to various duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid
him in "making a night of it." West’s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the
morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and
wined rather well.
Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was aroused by
cries coming from West’s room, where when they broke down the door, they found the two of us
unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken
remnants of West’s bottles and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had
become of our assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap
from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments
in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but
were specimens collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the
transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious
fireplace. To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was,
West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain
location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have our pugnacious
companion hunted down.
That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror -- the horror that to me eclipsed
the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having
been clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to
the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight -- the
dawn revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton
was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who
found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay
on the concrete just outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave
out.
The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the
wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague,
and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses
were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake -- in all, seventeen maimed
and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept
abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed
ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes
41
it had been hungry. The number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in
stricken homes and had not been alive.
On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on Crane
Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by
means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the college district had reported
hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the
general alarm and precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected
without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and
was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing.
For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism,
and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where
it beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years -- until the recent mishap,
when it escaped under circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the
searchers of Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned -- the
mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been
entombed but three days before -- the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the
medical school of Miskatonic University.
To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight
as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his
bandages, "Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!"
III
Six Shots by Moonlight
It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would
probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for
instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles
which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When
he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to
relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we
chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the potter’s field.
Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our requirements were
those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but
beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible moment -- for the essence of
Herbert West’s existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which
he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard’s cold
clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to
42
keep supplied with these indispensable things one must live quietly and not far from a place of
informal interment.
West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his hideous
experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of
college we had to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in
company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice in Bolton -- a factory
town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the
Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local
physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down
cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from
the local potter’s field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather
dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get
no nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district.
We were not much displeased, however, since there were no people between us and our sinister
source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we could haul our silent specimens
undisturbed.
Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first -- large enough to please most young
doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay
elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many
natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually
absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar -- the laboratory with
the long table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected
West’s various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter’s field. West
was experimenting madly to find something which would start man’s vital motions anew after
they had been stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly
obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for different types -- what would serve
for guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large
modifications.
The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render
perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough -West had had horrible experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful
vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the
total failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first
daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding
menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often
confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed -- a
psychological delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least
one of our reanimated specimens was still alive -- a frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at
Sefton. Then there was another -- our first -- whose exact fate we had never learned.
We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton -- much better than in Arkham. We had not been
settled a week before we got an accident victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its
eyes with an amazingly rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm -- if it
had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we
secured three more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather
43
shivery thing -- it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor;
interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either too diseased or too maimed
for use. We kept track of all the deaths and their circumstances with systematic care.
One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the
potter’s field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing -with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were
common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night
there had been such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had
come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and desperate case.
We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners
were watching a silent black form on the floor.
The match had been between Kid O’Brien -- a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most unHibernian hooked nose -- and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke." The negro had been
knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He
was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling
fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom
poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life -- but the world
holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the
law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in
spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly -- for a purpose I knew
too well.
There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it
home between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing
one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the
specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment.
Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary
patrolman of that section.
The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive
to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white
specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the
others -- dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter’s field,
and buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not
very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen -- the thing which had risen of itself
and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead
vines, fairly certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.
The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumours of a
suspected fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the
afternoon to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical
over her missing child -- a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to
appear for dinner -- and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak
heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants
are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts.
About seven o’clock in the evening she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful
44
scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held
him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of
vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still
missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the
family’s friends were busy with the dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous
strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian both
weighed heavily.
We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for
so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the
night before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work -- and perhaps
prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about.
After the clock had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to
pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.
I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West’s rap on my door. He was clad in
dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the
revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police.
"We’d better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn’t do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a
patient -- it would be like one of those fools to try the back door."
So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which
comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat
louder. When we reached the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon
streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the
obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police
investigation -- a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our
cottage -- my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his
revolver into the nocturnal visitor.
For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon
was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares -- a glassy-eyed, ink-black
apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked
blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object
terminating in a tiny hand.
45
IV
The Scream of the Dead
The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which
harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s
scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was
used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular
circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.
Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the
usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he
had chosen an isolated house near the potter’s field. Briefly and brutally stated, West’s sole
absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward
the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this ghastly
experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh
because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human because we
found that the solution had to be compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores
of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had
never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What
he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell intact
and capable of receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was
hope that this second and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection,
but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the
artificial motion, natural life must be extinct -- the specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely
dead.
The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University
Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical
nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now -- he was
small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold
blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his
terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the results of
defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid,
unnatural, and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.
One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us both to
unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum
bars; still another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and
done a deed -- West had had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew
any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing
to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived -- that thought haunted us shadowingly,
till finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the
cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for
extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he
looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long
visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He
had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach
46
from an entirely new angle -- that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on
a new and highly unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out
well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could
help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay
occurring before we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his
embalming compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again
some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed
in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the
secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any possibility have begun. What
would happen on reanimation, and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason,
West did not venture to predict. The experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had
saved the new body for my return, so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.
West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a well-dressed
stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills.
The walk through the town had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to
ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant,
and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to
West a heaven-sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was
unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert
Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his
disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment.
We buried our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter’s field. If, on
the other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established.
So without delay West had injected into the body’s wrist the compound which would hold it
fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind
imperilled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped
at last to obtain what he had never obtained before -- a rekindled spark of reason and perhaps a
normal, living creature.
So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a
white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked
uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without
stiffening, I was moved to seek West’s assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance
he gave readily enough; reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without
careful tests as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As
West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new
experiment; an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own.
Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his
needle had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise
the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution
might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to
affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not
withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale
enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied,
and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared
during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats
were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for
47
results on this first really fresh specimen -- the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in
rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.
West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to
bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and
caverns beyond death’s barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague
instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the
corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides -- I could not extract from
my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in
the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.
Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of
colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of
sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded
significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body’s
mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and
visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering.
Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still unintelligent and
not even curious.
In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of other
worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind,
but I think the last one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet know
whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped mouth; but I do know
that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables which I
would have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that
moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and
that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In
the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly
accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the
dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors -- not horror of the thing
that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional
fortunes were joined.
For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated
at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle
with the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution from which there could
be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain:
"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend -- keep that damned needle away from me!"
48
V
The Horror From the Shadows
Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the
battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed
me with devastating nausea, while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the
dark; yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all -the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.
In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders,
one of many Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not
entered the army on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man
whose indispensable assistant I was -- the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert
West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the
chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I
could have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I found the practice of medicine and
the companionship of West more and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and
through a colleague’s influence secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the
imperious persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.
When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either
naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual
machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional
martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted
in embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it had had to assume a military exterior. What he
wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar
branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he
had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than
an abundant supply of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.
Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of the dead. This
work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his
arrival in Boston; but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole
assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those
college days that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on
human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead
things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble
in discovering the proper formula, for each type of organism was found to need a stimulus
especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless
things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of
these failures had remained alive -- one was in an asylum while others had vanished -- and as he
thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual
stolidity.
West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and
had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and
during our early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been
49
largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a
gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a
nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen had been a
living body when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality
of rational thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had
completely hardened him.
Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer force of
fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert
West himself more horrible than anything he did -- that was when it dawned on me that his once
normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish
curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse
addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial
monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he
became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment -- a
languid Elagabalus of the tombs.
Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he
had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by
experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on
the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue separated from natural
physiological systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of neverdying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable
tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle -- first, whether any
amount of consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the
spinal cord and various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible
relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what
has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply
of freshly slaughtered human flesh -- and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.
The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a field
hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a
daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the barn-like
temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the
treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst of
his gory wares -- I could never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain
things. At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights
were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which
seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent
revolver-shots -- surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital.
Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience. Besides
human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with
such singular results. It was better than human material for maintaining life in organless
fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a
queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which
multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.
50
On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen -- a man at once physically
powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather
ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have
been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to
some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest
surgeon in our division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the
heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut.
Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been
spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great
surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the
lifeless thing which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he
finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to preserve it for
future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the operating table. He
injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the
ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer’s
uniform. I knew what he wanted -- to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without its
head, any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee.
Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.
I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution
into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe -- I should faint if I tried it, for
there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris
almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting,
bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black
shadows.
The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was expected
of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West’s
face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness,
reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain -- that man has no central connective
spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In
one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of
myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave
in a frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles
contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture
which was unmistakably one of desperation -- an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to
prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man’s last act in
life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.
What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination from the
shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a
cataclysm of German shell-fire -- who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved
survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he
could not; for it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself
was very simple, notable only for what it implied.
The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I
should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful
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thing about it. Neither was its message -- it had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for God’s
sake, jump!" The awful thing was its source.
For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows.
VI
The Tomb-Legions
When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They
suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could
not tell them the truth because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West
had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous
experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect
secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which
make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.
I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical
school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a
solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour
demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions.
Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments -- grisly masses of flesh that
had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous ammation. These were the
usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely
fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.
This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one
awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle,
and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had
succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and
seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating
appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I
became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to
notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for
some absurd suspicions.
West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness
and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness
was deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had
injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his
experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that first
specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham
professor’s body which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust
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unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the
other possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak of -- for in later years West’s
scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief
skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic
matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared; many
of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us
served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.
In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex
nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while
another part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances
do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation -- of them all, West knew the
whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle fear -- a very
fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in
the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a
fellow-physician who knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had
been removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be investigated.
Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had
moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly sure that articulate
sounds had come from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The
shell had been merciful, in a way -- but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we
two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions
of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.
West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest
burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically
aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore of little
use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly
constructed by imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete
disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from
the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this
cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with
the old burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a
number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb
of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied
the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for
the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the
first time West’s new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating
fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish
night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West’s decadence, but must add that it
was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last -- calm, cold,
slight, and yellow-haired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years
and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave
and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed and
pawed at Sefton bars.
The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious
glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the
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crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years.
Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning
the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent
men had entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing
military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost
ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was
handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light
fell on it -- for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen
this man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten
away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster
committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused, gave a signal which
precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did
not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who
could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like
unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned,
every trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.
From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralyzed. At midnight the
doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the
bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strangelooking figures bearing a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them
had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, "Express -- prepaid." They filed out of the house with a
jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient
cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West
came downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct
name and present address. It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St.
Eloi, Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless
reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which -- perhaps -- had
uttered articulate sounds.
West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, "It’s the finish
-- but let’s incinerate -- this." We carried the thing down to the laboratory -- listening. I do not
remember many particulars -- you can imagine my state of mind -- but it is a vicious lie to say it
was Herbert West’s body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened
wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box,
after all.
It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb
masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black
aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There
was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some
phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity -- or
worse -- could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not
human at all -- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly,
one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came
out into the laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A
sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or
utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the
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fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West’s head was carried
off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw
that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic,
visible emotion.
Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only
unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they
will not connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told
them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no
more. They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I might not
be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.
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