Call of Cthulhu - Tale

Chapter 2
The Tale of Inspector
Legrasse
The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief
so signicant 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 connexion 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 betted one of his authority and attainments, had had
a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the rst to be
approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation
to oer 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 realise that they
had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and innitely more
diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin,
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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
oering 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 gure whose utter
strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at
unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised 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 gure, which was nally 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, 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 civilisation'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
ecks and striations resembled
nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the
base were equally baing; 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 didence of the odd tri
e he knew.
This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropol-
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ogy 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 sacrices 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 clis. 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."
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 signicance.
It savoured 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.
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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 good-natured descendants of Latte'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-
ames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could
stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, lling 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 intensied 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 mued 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
lter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of forest night.
Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused
point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so
Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into
black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute,
substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends
of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless
white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that batwinged
devils
ew 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 terried the squatters more
than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's
men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare
and mued 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
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should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped
themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies 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 hypnotised 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 bonre;
in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of
ame,
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 scaolds set up at regular intervals with the
ame-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 re.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes
which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal
responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper
within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D.
Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative.
He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings,
and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the
remotest trees|but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horried pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration.
Duty came rst; and although there must have been nearly a hundred
mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their rearms and
plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For ve minutes the resultant
din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were
red, 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 by
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their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness,
the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally
aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and
mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde
Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before
many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper
and older than Negro fetichism 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 rst 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
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in the Pacic. 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
esh 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 transmitted
thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after innities of
chaos, the rst men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among
them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach
the
eshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those rst 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
ame 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 sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters,
full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had
cut o the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high-priests
said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came
out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of
dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of
them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself o 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
13
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."