The Call of Cthulhu / Зов Ктулху. Говард Лавкрафт

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Mate Johansen[88] proceeded to navigate the captured yacht. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none knew about it in that part of the ocean. Six of the men somehow died ashore; Johansen says very little about this part of his story. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage it, but were driven 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[89], his companion, died. There was no apparent cause for Briden’s death, and it happened probably due to excitement or exposure. The Alert was well known as an island trader[90], and bore an evil reputation. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted curiosity. It started 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 make Johansen 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 data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. Why did the hybrid crew order the Emma to sail back? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which Johansen was so secretive? And most important, what deep connection of dates was there, so carefully noted by my uncle?

      March 1st – or February 28th according to the International Date Line[91] – the earthquake and storm had come. The Alert and her crew had sailed eagerly from Dunedin as if somebody had summoned it, and on the other side of the Earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange Cyclopean city, while a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of 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 gained heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, while an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had gone suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd – the date on which all dreams of the strange city ceased, and Wilcox recovered from the strange fever? An old Castro talked about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams. In some way the second of April had stopped monstrous menace, the siege of mankind’s soul.

      That evening I took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; there, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had entered the old sea-taverns. But 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[92] after a questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. All the admiralty officials could do was to give me his Oslo address.

      After that I went to Sydney and talked uselessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, but gained nothing. 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. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the rock like it did not exist. Then I remembered the words Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Old Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”

      I decided to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Johansen lived, I discovered, in the Old Town. I made a brief taxi-trip, and knocked at the door of a neat and ancient building. A sad-faced woman in black came out and told me that Gustaf Johansen was dead.

      He had not lived long after his return, said his wife, the sea events 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. During a walk near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two sailors at once helped him, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians said that his death occurred due to a heart trouble and a weakened constitution.

      I persuaded the widow that I had to get her husband’s “technical matters”. I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat.

      It was a naive sailor’s effort at a diary – to recall day by day that last awful voyage.

      Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing. 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 blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea.

      Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma had left Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of the earthquake-born tempest. Once more under control[93], the ship was making good progress when she was held up[94] by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. He speaks with significant horror of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men saw a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47°9’, W. Longitude 123°43’, came 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 ages behind history by the vast, loathsome creatures that came down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive. The thoughts called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but 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. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder demons, and probably guessed that it was nothing of this planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the height of the great carven monolith, and at the identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is visible in every line of the frightened description.

      Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks. Even the sun seemed distorted.

      It was Rodriguez the Portuguese[95] 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 squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door[96] or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, because the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

      Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan[97] studied the edge, pressing each point separately. He climbed along the grotesque stone moulding – 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

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