ACTUALLY, IT BEGAN a long time ago: how long, I have not dared to guess: but so far as is concerned my own connection with the case that has ruined my practice and earned me the dubiety of the medical profession in regard to my sanity, it began with Amos Tuttles death. That was on a night in late winter, with a south wind blowing on the edge of spring. I had been in ancient, legend-haunted Arkham that day; he had learned of my presence there from Doctor Ephraim Sprague, who attended him, and had the doctor call the Lewiston House and bring me to that gloomy estate on the Aylesbury Road near the Innsmouth Turnpike. It was not a place to which I liked to go, but the old man had paid me well to tolerate his sullenness and eccentricity, and Sprague had made it clear that he was dying: a matter of hours.
And he was. He had hardly the strength to motion Sprague from the room and talk to me, though his voice came clearly enough and with little Effort.
"You know my will," he said. "Stand by it to the letter.”
That will had been a bone of contention between us because of its provision that before his heir and sole surviving nephew, Paul Tuttle, could claim his estate, the house would have to be destroyed—not taken down, but destroyed, together with certain books designated by shelf number in his final instructions. His death-bed was no place to debate this wanton destruction anew; I nodded, and he accepted that. Would to heaven I had obeyed without question!
"Now then," he went on, "there's a book downstairs you must take back to the library of Miskatonic University."
He gave me the title. At that time it meant little to me; but it has since come to mean more than I can say—symbol of age-old horror, of maddening things beyond the thin veil of prosaic daily life—the Latin translation of the abhorred Necronomicon by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
I found the book easily enough. For the last two decades of his life Amos Tuttle had lived in increasing seclusion among books collected from all parts of the world: old, worm-eaten texts, with titles that might have frightened away a less hardened man—the sinister De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn, Comte d'Erlette's terrible Cultes des Goules, Von Junzt's damnable Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I did not then know how rare these were, nor did I understand the priceless rarity of certain fragmentary pieces: the frightful Book of Eibon, the horror-fraught Pnakotic Manuscripts, and the dread R'lyeh Text; for these, I found upon an examination of Amos Tuttle's accounts after his death, he had paid a fabulous sum. But nowhere did I find so high a figure as that he had paid for the R'lyeh Text, which had come to him from somewhere in the dark interior of Asia; according to his files, he had paid for it no less than one hundred thousand dollars; but in addition to this, there was present in his account in regard to this yellowed manuscript a notation which puzzled me at the time, but which I was to have ominous cause to remember—after the sum above mentioned, Amos Tuttle had written in his spidery hand: in addition to the promise.
These facts did not come out until Paul Tuttle was in possession, but before that, several strange occurrences took place, things that should have aroused my suspicion in regard to the countryside legends of some powerful supernatural influence clinging to the old house. The first of these was of small consequence in view of the others; it was simply that upon returning the Necronomicon to the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham, I found myself conveyed by a tight-lipped librarian straightaway to the office of the director, Doctor Llanfer, who asked me bluntly to account for the book's being in my hands. I had no hesitation in doing so, and thereby dis covered that the rare volume was never permitted out of the library; that, in fact, Amos Tuttle had abstracted it on one of his rare visits, having failed in his attempts to persuade Doctor Llanfer to permit his borrowing it. And Amos had been clever enough to prepare in advance a marvellously good imitation of the book, with a binding almost flawless in its resemblance, and the actual reproduction of title and opening pages of the text reproduced from his memory; upon the occasion of his handling the mad Arab s book, he had substituted his dummy for the original and gone off with one of the two copies of this shunned work available on the North American continent, one of the five copies known to be in existence in the world.
The second of these things was a little more startling, though it bears the trappings of conventional haunted house stories. Both Paul Tuttle and I heard at odd times in the house at night, while his uncles corpse lay there particularly, the sound of padding footsteps, but there was this strangeness about them: they were not like footsteps falling within the house at all, but like the steps of some creature in size almost beyond the conception of man walking at a great distance underground\ so that the sound actually vibrated into the house from the depths of earth below. And when I have reference to steps, it is only for lack of a better word to describe the sounds, for they were not flat steps at all, but a kind of spongy, jelly-like, sloshing sound made with the force of so much weight behind them that the consequent shuddering of earth in that place was communicated to us in the way we heard it. There was nothing more than this, and presently it was gone, ceasing, coincidentally enough, in the hours of that dawn when Amos Tuttle s corpse was borne away forty-eight hours sooner than we had planned. The sounds we dismissed as settlings of the earth along the distant coast, not alone, because we did not attach too great an importance to them, but because of the final thing that took place before Paul Tuttle officially took possession of the old house on the Aylesbury Road.
This last thing was the most shocking of all, and of the three who knew it, only I now remain alive, Doctor Sprague being dead this day one month, though he took only one look and said, "Bury him at once!" And so we did, for the change in Amos Tuttle s body was ghastly beyond conception, and especially horrible in its suggestion, and it was so because the body was not falling into any visible decay, but changing subtly in another way, becoming suffused with a weird iridescence, which darkened presently until it was al most ebon, and the appearance of the flesh of his puffy hands and face of minute, scale-like growth. There was likewise some change about the shape of his head; it seemed to lengthen, to take on a curious kind of fish-like look, accompanied by a faint exudation of thick fish smell from the coffin; and that these changes were not purely imaginative was shockingly substantiated when the body was subsequently found in the place where malignant after-dwellers had conveyed it, and there, at last falling into putrefaction though it was, others saw with me the terrible, suggestive changes that had taken place, though they had mercifully no knowledge of what had gone before. But at the time when Amos Tuttle lay in the old house, there was no hint of what was to come; we were quick to close the coffin and quicker still to take it to the ivy-covered Tuttle vault in Arkham cemetery.
Paul Tuttle was at that time in his late forties, but, like so many men of his generation, he had the face and figure of a youth in his twenties. Indeed, the only hint of his age lay in the faint traces of grey in the hair of his moustache and temples. He was a tall, dark-haired man, slightly overweight, with frank blue eyes which years of scholarly research had not reduced to the necessity of glasses. Nor was he ignorant of law, for he quickly made known that if I, as his uncle s executor, were not disposed to overlook the clause in his will that called for the destruction of the house on the Aylesbury Road, he would contest the will on the justifiable ground of Amos Tuttle s insanity. I pointed out to him that he stood alone against Doctor Sprague and me, but I was at the same time not blind to the fact that the unreasonableness of the request might very well defeat us; besides, I myself considered the clause in this regard amazingly wanton in the destruction it demanded, and was not prepared to fight a contest because of so minor a matter. Yet, could I have foreseen what was to come, could I have dreamed of the horror to follow, I would have carried out Amos Tuttle s last request regardless of any decision of the court. However, such foresight was not mine.
We went to see Judge Wilton, Tuttle and I, and put the matter before him. He agreed with us that the destruction of the house seemed needless, and more than once hinted at concurrence with Paul Tuttles belief in his late uncle s madness.
"The old mans been touched for as long as I knew him," he said dryly.
"And as for you, Haddon, can you get up on a stand and swear that he was absolutely sane?”
Remembering with a certain uneasiness the theft of the Necronomicon from Miskatonic University, I had to confess that I could not.
So Paul Tuttle took possession of the estate on the Aylesbury Road, and I went back to my legal practice in Boston, not dissatisfied with the way things had gone, and yet not without a lurking uneasiness difficult to define, an insidious feeling of impending tragedy, no little fed by my memory of what we had seen in Amos Tuttle s coffin before we sealed and locked it away in the centuries-old vault in Arkham cemetery.
2
IT WAS NOT FOR some time that I saw the gambrel roofs and Georgian balustrades of witch-cursed Arkham again, and then was there on business for a client who wished me to see to it that his property in ancient Innsmouth was protected from the Government agents and police who had taken possession of the shunned and haunted town though it was now some months since the mysterious dynamiting of blocks of the waterfront buildings and part of the terror-hung Devil Reef in the sea beyond—a mystery which has been carefully guarded and hidden since then, though I have learned of a paper purporting to give the true facts of the Innsmouth horror, a privately published manuscript written by a Providence author. It was impossible at that time to proceed to Innsmouth because Secret Service men had closed all roads; however, I made representations to the proper person and received an assurance that my client s property would be fully protected, since it lay well back from the waterfront; so I proceeded about other small matters in Arkham.
I went to luncheon that day in a small restaurant near Miskatonic University, and while there, heard myself accosted in a familiar voice. I looked up and saw Doctor Llanfer, the university library's director. He seemed somewhat upset, and betrayed his concern clearly in his features. I invited him to join me, but he declined; he did, however, sit down, somewhat on the chair s edge.
"Have you been out to see Paul Tuttle?" he asked abruptly.
"I thought of going this afternoon," I replied. "Is anything wrong?"
He flushed a little guiltily. "That I cant say," he answered precisely. "But there have been some nasty rumours loose in Arkham. And the Necronomicon is gone again."
"Good Heaven! you're surely not accusing Paul Tuttle of having taken it?" I exclaimed, half in surprise, half amused. "I could not imagine of what use it might be to him."
"Still—he has it," Doctor Llanfer persisted. "But I don't think he stole it, and should not like to be understood as saying so. It is my opinion that one of our clerks gave it to him and is now reluctant to confess the enormity of his error. Be that as it may, the book has not come back, and I fear we shall have to go after it."
"I could ask him about it," I said.
"If you would, thank you," responded Doctor Llanfer, a little eagerly. "I take it you've heard nothing of the rumours that are rife here?" I shook my head.
"Very likely they are only the outgrowth of some imaginative mind," he continued, but the air of him suggested that he was not willing or able to accept so prosaic an explanation. "It appears that passengers along the Aylesbury Road have heard strange sounds late at night, all apparently emanating from the Tuttle house."
"What sounds?" I asked, not without immediate apprehension.
"Apparently those of footsteps; and yet, I understand no one will definitely say so, save for one young man who characterized them as soggy and said that they sounded as if something big were walking in mud and water nearby."
The strange sounds Paul Tuttle and I had heard on the night following Amos Tuttle's death had passed from my mind, but at this mention of footsteps by Doctor Llanfer, the memory of what I had heard returned in full. I fear I gave myself slightly away, for Doctor Llanfer observed my sudden interest; fortunately, he chose to interpret it as evidence that I had indeed heard something of these rumours, my statement to the contrary notwithstanding. I did not choose to correct him in this regard, and at the same time I experienced a sudden desire to hear no more; so I did not press him for further details, and presently he rose to return to his duties, and left me with my promise to ask Paul Tuttle for the missing book still sounding in my ears.
His story, however slight it was, nevertheless sounded within me a note of alarm; I could not help recalling the numerous small things that held to memory—the steps we had heard, the odd clause in Amos Tuttle's will, the awful metamorphosis in Amos Tuttle's corpse. There was already then a faint suspicion in my mind that some sinister chain of events was becoming manifest here; my natural curiosity rose, though not without a certain feeling of distaste, a conscious desire to withdraw, and the recurrence of that strange, insidious conviction of impending tragedy. But I determined to see Paul Tuttle as early as possible.
My work in Arkham consumed the afternoon, and it was not until dusk that I found myself standing before the massive oaken door of the old Tuttle house on Aylesbury Road. My rather peremptory knock was answered by Paul himself, who stood, lamp held high in hand, peering out into the growing night.
"Haddon!" he exclaimed, throwing the door wider. "Come in!”
That he was genuinely glad to see me I could not doubt, for the note of enthusiasm in his voice precluded any other supposition. The heartiness of his welcome also served to confirm me in my intention not to speak of the rumours I had heard and to proceed about an inquiry after the Necronomicon at my own good time. I remembered that just prior to his uncle's death, Tuttle had been working on a philological treatise relating to the growth of the Sac Indian language, and determined to inquire about this paper as if nothing else were of moment.
"You've had supper, I suppose," said Tuttle, leading me down the hall and into the library.
I said that I had eaten in Arkham.
He put the lamp down upon a book-laden table, pushing some papers to one side as he did so. Inviting me to sit down, he resumed the seat he had evidently left to answer my knock.
I saw now that he was somewhat dishevelled, and that he had permitted his beard to grow. He had also taken on more weight, doubtless as a consequence of strictly enforced scholarship, with all its attendant confinement to the house and lack of physical exercise.
"How fares the Sac treatise?" I asked.
"I've put that aside," he said shortly. "I may take it up later. For the present, I've struck something far more important—just how important I cannot yet say."
I saw now that the books on the table were not the usual scholarly tomes I had seen on his Ipswich desk, but with some faint apprehension observed that they were the books condemned by the explicit instructions of Tuttle's uncle, as a glance at the vacant spaces on the proscribed shelves clearly corroborated.
Tuttle turned to me almost eagerly and lowered his voice as if in fear of being overheard. "As a matter of fact, Haddon, its colossal—a gigantic feat of the imagination; only for this: I'm no longer certain that it is imaginative, indeed, I'm not. I wondered about that clause in my uncle's will; I couldnt understand why he should want this house destroyed, and rightly surmised that the reason must lie somewhere in the pages of those books he so carefully condemned." He waved a hand at the incunabula before him. "So I examined them, and I can tell you I have discovered things of such incredible strangeness, such bizarre horror, that I hesitate sometimes to dig deeper into the mystery. Frankly, Haddon, it is the most outre matter I've ever come upon, and I must say it involved considerable research, quite apart from these books Uncle Amos collected."
"Indeed," I said dryly. "And I dare say you've had to do considerable travelling?"
He shook his head. "None at all, apart from one trip to Miskatonic University Library. The fact is, I found I could be served just as well by mail. You'll remember those papers of uncle's? Well, I discovered among them that Uncle Amos paid a hundred thousand for a certain bound manuscript—bound in human skin, incidentally—together with a cryptic line: in addition to the promise. I began to ask myself what promise Uncle Amos could have made, and to whom; whether to the man or woman who had sold him this R'lyeh Text or to some other. I proceeded forthwith to search out the name of the man who had sold him the book, and presently found it with his address (some Chinese priest from inner Tibet) and wrote to him. His reply reached me a week ago."
He bent away and rummaged briefly among the papers on his desk, until he found what he sought and handed it to me.
"I wrote in my uncle's name not trusting entirely in the transaction, and wrote, moreover, as if I had forgotten or had a hope to avoid the promise," he continued. "His reply is fully as cryptic as my uncle's notation."
Indeed, it was so, for the crumpled paper that was handed to me bore, in a strange, stilted script, but one line, without signature or date: To afford a haven for Him Who Is Not To Be Named.
I dare say I looked up at Tuttle with my wonderment clearly mirrored in my eyes, for he smiled before he replied.
"Means nothing to you, eh? No more did it to me, when first I saw it. But not for long. In order to understand what follows, you should know at least a brief outline of the mythology—if indeed it is only mythology—in which this mystery is rooted. My Uncle Amos apparently knew and believed all about it, for the various notes scattered in the margins of his proscribed books bespeak a knowledge far beyond mine. Apparently the mythology springs from a common source with our own legendary Genesis, but only by a very thin resemblance; sometimes I am tempted to say that this mythology is far older than any other—certainly in its implications it goes far beyond, being cosmic and ageless, for its beings are of two natures, and two only: the Old or Ancient Ones, the Elder Gods, of cosmic good\ and those of cosmic evil, bearing many names, and themselves of different groups, as if associated with the elements and yet transcending them: for there are the Water Beings, hidden in the depths; those of Air that are the primal lurkers beyond time; those of Earth, horrible animate survivals of distant eons. Incredible time ago, the Old Ones banished from the cosmic places all the Evil Ones, imprisoning them in many places; but in time these Evil Ones spawned hellish minions who set about preparing for their return to greatness. The Old Ones are nameless, but their power is and will apparently always be great enough to check that of the others.
"Now, among the Evil Ones there is apparently often conflict, as among lesser beings. The Water Beings oppose those of Air; the Fire Beings oppose Earth Beings, but nevertheless, they together hate and fear the Elder Gods and hope always to defeat them in some future time. Among my Uncle Amos s papers there are many fearsome names written in his crabbed script: Great Cthulhu} the Lake of Hali} Tsathoggua} Yog-Sothoth} Nyarlathotep, Azathoth} Hastur the Unspeakable; Yuggoth, Aldones, Thale; Aldebaran, the Hyades, Carcosa} and others: and it is possible to divide some of those names into vaguely suggestive classes from those notes which are explicable to me—though many present insoluble mysteries I cannot hope as yet to penetrate; and many, too, are written in a language I do not know, together with cryptic and oddly frightening symbols and signs. But through what I have learned, it is possible to know that Great Cthulhu is one of the Water Beings, even as Hastur is of the Beings that stalk the star-spaces; and it is possible to gather from vague hints in these forbidden books where some of these beings are. So I can believe that in this mythology, Great Cthulhu was banished to a place beneath the seas of Earth, while Hastur was hurled into outer space, into that place where the black stars hang, which is indicated as Aldebaran of the Hyades, which is the place mentioned by Chambers, even as repeats the Carcosa of Bierce.
"Coming upon this communication from the priest in Tibet in the light of these things, surely one fact must come clearly forth: Haddon, surely, beyond the shadow of doubt, Him Who Is Not To Be Named can be none other than Hastur the Unspeakable!"
The sudden cessation of his voice startled me; there was something hypnotic about his eager whisper, and something too that filled me with a conviction far beyond the power of Paul Tuttle s words. Somewhere, deep within the recesses of my mind, a chord had been struck, a mnemonic connection I could not dismiss or trace and which left me with a feeling as of limitless age, a cosmic bridge into another place and time.
"That seems logical," I said at last, cautiously.
"Logical! Haddon, it is; it must be!" he exclaimed.
"Granting it," I said, "what then?”
"Why, granting it," he went on quickly, "we have conceded that my Uncle Amos promised to make ready a haven in preparation for the return of Hastur from whatever region of outer space now imprisons him. Where that haven is, or what manner of place it may be, has not thus far been my concern, though I can guess, perhaps. This is not the time for guessing, and yet it would seem, from certain other evidence at hand, that there may be some permissible deductions made. The first and most important of these is of a double nature—ergo, something unforeseen prevented the return of Hastur within my uncle s lifetime, and yet some other being has made itself manifest." Here he looked at me with unusual frankness and not a little nervousness. "As for the evidence of this manifestation, I would rather not at this time go into it. Suffice it to say that I believe I have such evidence at hand. I return to my original premise, then.
"Among the few marginal notations made by my uncle, there are two or three especially remarkable ones in the R'lyeh Text; indeed, in the light of what is known or can justifiably be guessed, they are sinister and ominous notes.”
So speaking, he opened the ancient manuscript and turned to a place quite close to the beginning of the narrative.
"Now attend me, Haddon," he said, and I rose and bent over him to look at the spidery, almost illegible script that I knew for Amos Tuttles. "Observe the underscored line of text: Ph'nglui mglwnafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagah} naglfhtagn, and what follows it in my uncle s unmistakable hand: His minions preparing the way, and he no longer dreaming? (WT: 2/28) and at a more recent date, to judge by the shakiness of his hand, the single abbreviation: Inns! Obviously, this means nothing without a translation of the text. Failing this at the moment I first saw this note, I turned my attention to the parenthetical notation, and within a short while solved its meaning as a reference to a popular magazine, Weird Tales, for February, 1928. I have it here."
He opened the magazine against the meaningless text, partially concealing the lines which had begun to take on an uncanny atmosphere of eldritch age beneath my eyes, and there beneath Paul Tuttles hand lay the first page of a story so obviously belonging to this unbelievable mythology that I could not repress a start of astonishment. The title, only partly covered by his hand, was The Call of Cthulhu, by H. P. Lovecraft. But Tuttle did not linger over the first page; he turned well into the heart of the story before he paused and presented to my gaze the identical unreadable line that lay beside the crabbed script of Amos Tuttle in the incredibly rare R'lyeh Text upon which the magazine reposed. And there, only a paragraph below, appeared what purported to be a translation of the utterly unknown language of the Text: In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
"There you have it," resumed Tuttle with some satisfaction. "Cthulhu, too, waited for the time of his resurgence—how many eons, no one may know; but my uncle has questioned whether Cthulhu still lies dreaming, and following this, has written and doubly underscored an abbreviation which can only stand for Innsmouth! This, together with the ghastly things half hinted in this revealing story purporting to be only fiction, opens up a vista of undreamed horror, of age-old evil."
"Good Heaven!" I exclaimed involuntarily. "Surely you cant think this fantasy has come to life?"
Tuttle turned and gave me a strangely distant look. "What I think doesn't matter, Haddon," he replied gravely. "But there is one thing I would like very much to know—what happened at Innsmouth? What has happened there for decades past that people have shunned it so? Why has this once prosperous port sunk into oblivion, half its houses empty, its property practically worthless? And why was it necessary for Government men to blow up row after row of the waterfront dwellings and warehouses? Lastly, for what earthly reason did they send a submarine to torpedo the marine spaces beyond Devil Reef just out of Innsmouth?"
"I know nothing of that," I replied.
But he paid no heed; his voice rose a little, uncertain and trembling, and he said, "I can tell you, Haddon. It is even as my Uncle Amos has written: Great Cthulhu has risen again!"
For a moment I was shaken; then I said, "But it is Hastur for whom he waited."
"Precisely," agreed Tuttle in a clipped professorial voice. "Then I should like to know who or what it is that walks in the earth in the dark hours when Fomalhaut has risen and the Hyades are in the east!”
3
WITH THIS, HE ABRUPTLY changed the subject; he began to ask me questions about myself and my practice, and presently, when I rose to go, he asked me to stay the night. This I consented finally, and with some reluctance, to do, whereupon he departed at once to make a room ready for me. I took the opportunity thus afforded to examine his desk more closely for the Necronomicon missing from the library of Miskatonic University. It was not on his desk, but, crossing to the shelves, I found it there. I had just taken it down and was examining it to make certain of its identity, when Tuttle reentered the room. His quick eyes darted to the book in my hands, and he half smiled.
"I wish you'd take that back to Doctor Llanfer when you go in the morning, Haddon," he said casually. "Now that I've copied the text, I have no further use for it."
"I'll do that gladly," I said, relieved that the matter could so easily be settled.
Shortly after, I retired to the room on the second floor which he had prepared for me. He accompanied me as far as the door, and there paused briefly, uncertain of speech ready for his tongue and yet not permitted to pass his lips; for he turned once or twice, bade me good night before he spoke what weighed upon his thoughts: "By the way—if you hear anything in the night, dont be alarmed, Haddon. Whatever it is, its harmless—as yet."
It was not until he had gone and I was alone in my room that the significance of what he had said and the way he had said it dawned upon me. It grew upon me then that this was confirmation of the wild rumours that had penetrated Arkham, and that Tuttle spoke not entirely without fear. I undressed slowly and thoughtfully, and got into the pyjamas Tuttle had laid out for me, without deviating