The Call of Cthulhu / Зов Ктулху. Говард Лавкрафт

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trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.

      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of an acre’s extent, clear of trees and dry. On this now leaped and twisted indescribable horde of humans. Totally naked, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height, on top of which rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals hung, head downward, the marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. Inside this circle the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, from left to right in endless bacchanal[57] between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

      It may be only imagination, but a Spanish man heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot within the wood. This man, Joseph D. Galvez[58], I later met and questioned. He said that he heard beating of great wings, and saw a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees but I suppose he was a little superstitious.

      But duty came first; and the police relied on their firearms and went determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the chaos was beyond description. Shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count forty-seven sullen prisoners, to whom he ordered to dress and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two were severely wounded. Of course, Legrasse took the statuette from the monolith.

      After a trip, the prisoners were examined. They were men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type[59]. Most were seamen, some negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands[60]. But before many questions were asked, it became clear that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved.

      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones[61] 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 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, would rise and rule the Earth. Some day he will call, when the stars are ready, and the secret cult will always be waiting to liberate him.

      Meanwhile no more can be told. There was a secret which could not be extracted. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth: some shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few[62]. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but nobody might say how the others looked like. 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 taken to various hospitals. All denied ritual murders, and said that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones[63] which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. And nothing more could be known. What the police learned came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro[64], who said that he had sailed to different ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.

      Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been ages when other Creatures ruled on the Earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, the deathless Chinamen had told him, could still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific[65]. They all died long ago before men came, but there were ways 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 but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars came round to the right positions, They could travel 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 prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think while millions of years passed 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 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.

      Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall idols which the Great Ones showed 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 servants and resume His rule of Earth. This time would be easy to know, for then mankind would become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside. And all men would be 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 tell about 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 off the communication. But memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then the black spirits of Earth would come out, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours. But old Castro dared not speak much of them. He became silent hurriedly, and said nothing more. He curiously declined to mention the size of the Old Ones, too. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars[66], dreams hidden and untouched. It was not connected to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever mentioned it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad arab Abdul Alhazred[67] which the initiated might read, especially the this couplet:

      “That is not dead which can eternal lie[68],

      And with strange ages even death may die.”

      Legrasse, deeply impressed, had inquired about 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[69] could say nothing about either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with the Greenland tale of

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