I T IS FORTUNATE that the limitations of the human mind do not often permit viewing in proper perspective all the facts and events upon which it touches. I have thought this many times particularly in regard to the curious circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Jason Wecter, music and art critic of the Boston Dial, which took place a year ago and about which many theories were advanced, ranging from a suspicion of murder by some disappointed artist, smarting under Wecters biting invective, to the belief that Wecter simply took off for parts unknown, without word to anyone, and for a reason known only to himself.
This latter belief comes closer to actuality, perhaps than is commonly supposed, though its acceptance is a matter of terminology, and involves the question of whether or not Wecters absence was voluntary or involuntary. There is, however, one explanation which offers itself to those who are imaginative enough to grasp it, and the certain circumstances surrounding the event lead, indeed, to no other conclusion. In these circumstances I had a part, not a small one, by any means, though it was not recognized as such even by me until after the fact of Jason Wecter s vanishing.
These events began with the expression of a wish, than which nothing could be more prosaic. Wecter, who lived alone in an old house in Kings Lane, Cambridge, well away from the beaten thoroughfare, was a collector of primitive art work, preferably in wood or stone; he had such things as the strange religious carvings of the Penitentes, the bas-reliefs of the Mayas, the outre sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith, the wooden fetish figures and the carvings of gods and goddesses out of the South Seas islands, and many others; and he had wished for something in wood that might be "different," though the pieces by Smith seemed to me to offer as much variety as anyone could wish. But Smiths were not in wood; Wecter wanted something in wood to balance his collection, and, admittedly, he had nothing in wood save some few masks from Ponape which came close to the strange and wonderful imagery of the Smith sculptures.
I suppose that more than one of his friends was looking for something in wood for Jason Wecter, but it fell to my lot to find it one day in an outof-the-way second-hand shop in Portland, where I had gone for a holiday— a strange piece indeed, but exquisitely done, a kind of bas-relief of an octopoid creature rising out of a broken monolithic structure in a subaqueous setting. The price of four dollars was extremely reasonable, and the fact that I could not interpret the carving was, if anything, all the more likely to add to its value in Wecter s eyes.
I have described the "creature" as "octopoid," but it was not an octopus. What it was I did not know; its appearance suggested a body much longer than and different from that of an octopus, and its tentacular appendages issued not only from its face, as if from the place where a nose ought to be—much as in the Smith sculpture Elder God—but also from its sides and from the central part of its body. The two appendages issuing from its face were clearly prehensile and were carved in an attitude of flaring outward, as if about to grasp, or grasping something. Immediately above these two tentacles were deep-set eyes, carved with uncanny skill, so that the impression was one of vast and disturbing evil. At its base there was carved a line in no known language:
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgahnaglfhtagn.
Of the nature of the wood in which it was carved—a dark brown, almost black wood with a hitherto unfamiliar grain of many whorls—I knew nothing, save that it was unusually heavy for wood. Though it was larger than I had in mind to get for Jason Wecter, I knew that he would like it.
Where had it come from? I asked the phlegmatic little man behind the cluttered desk. He raised his spectacles to his forehead and said that he could tell me no more than that it had come out of the Atlantic. "Maybe washed off some vessel," he hazarded. It had been brought in with other things but a week or two ago by an old fellow who habitually scavenged along the coast for such pieces among the debris washed up by the sea. I asked what it might represent, but of this the proprietor knew even less than of its source. Jason was therefore free to invent any legend he chose to account for it.
He was delighted with the piece, and especially because he discovered immediately certain startling similarities between it and the stone sculptures by Smith. As an authority on primitive art, he pointed out another factor which made it clear that the proprietor of the shop from which I had obtained it had practically given it to me at four dollars—certain marks which indicated that the piece had been made by tools far older than those of our time, or indeed, of the civilized world as we knew it. These details were but of passing interest to me, of course, since I did not share Wecters liking for primitives, but I confess to feeling an unaccountable revulsion at Wecters juxtaposition of this octopoid carving with Smith s work, arising out of unvoiced questions which troubled me—if indeed this thing were centuries old, as Wecter inferred, and represented no known kind of carving previously recognized, how came it that the modern sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith bore such resemblance to it?—and was it not more than a coincidence that Smith s figures created out of the stuff of his weird fiction and poetry should parallel the art of someone removed many hundreds of years in time and leagues in space from him?
But these questions were not asked. Perhaps if they had been, subsequent events might have been altered. Wecters enthusiasm and delight were accepted as tributes to my judgement and the carving placed on his wide mantel with the best of his wooden pieces; there I was content to leave it, and to forget it.
It was a fortnight before I saw Jason Wecter again, and I would perhaps not have seen him immediately on my return to Boston if it had not been for my attention being called to a particularly savage criticism of a public showing of the sculptures of Oscar Bogdoga, whose work Wecter had given high praise only two months before. Indeed, Wecters review of his show was of such a nature as to excite the disturbed interest of many mutual friends; it indicated a new approach to sculpture on Wecter s part, and promised many surprises to those who regularly followed his criticisms. However, one of our mutual acquaintances who was a psychiatrist confessed to some alarm over the curious allusions manifest in Wecter s short but remarkable article.
I read it with mounting surprise, and immediately observed certain distinct departures from Wecter s customary manner. His charge that Bogdoga's work lacked "fire . . . the element of suspense . . . any pretence of spirituality" was usual enough; but the assertions that the artist "evidently had no familiarity with the cult-art of Ahapi or Ahmnoida" and that Bogdoga might have done better than a hybrid imitation of "the Ponape school" were not only inapropos but completely out of character, for Bogdoga was a midEuropean whose heavy masses bore far more similarity to those of Epstein than to the work of, for instance, Mestrovic, and certainly none at all to the primitives which were such a delight to Wecter, and which had manifestly now begun to affect his judgement. For Wecter s entire article was studded with strange references to artists no one had even heard of, to places far in space and time, if indeed they were of this earth, and to culture patterns which bore no relation whatever to any at all familiar even to informed readers.
Yet his approach to Bogdoga's art had not been entirely unanticipated, for he had only two days before written a critique of a new symphony by Franz Hoebel given its initial performance by the flamboyant and egocentric Fradelitski, filled with references to "the fluted music of the spheres," and "those piped notes, pre-Druidic in origin, which haunted the aether long before mankind raised an instrument of any kind to hands or lips." At the same time he had hailed a playing, on the same programme, of Harris's Symphony Number which he had publicly detested previously, as "a brilliant example of a return to that preprimitive music which haunts the ancestral consciousness of mankind, the music of the Great Old Ones, emerging despite the overlayer of Fradelitski—but then, Fradelitski, having no creative music in him, must of necessity impose upon every work under his baton enough Fradelitski to gratify his ego, no matter how much it may slander the composer.”
These two utterly mystifying reviews sent me in haste to Wecter's home, where I found him brooding at his desk with the offending reviews and a sizeable stack of letters—doubtless in protest—before him.
"Ah, Pinckney," he greeted me, "no doubt you too are brought here by these curious reviews of mine."
"Not exactly," I hedged. "Recognizing that any criticism stems from personal opinions, you re at liberty to write what you like, as long as you re sincere. But who the devil are Ahapi and Ahmnoida?"
"I wish I knew.”
He spoke so earnestly that I could not doubt his sincerity.
"But I haven't a doubt that they existed," he went on. "Just as the Great Old Ones appear to have some status in ancient lore.”
"How did you come to refer to them if you dont know who they are?" I asked.
"I cant entirely explain that, either, Pinckney," he answered, a troubled frown on his face. "But I can try."
Thereupon he launched into a not entirely coherent account of certain things which had happened to him ever since his acquisition of the octopoidal carving I had found in Portland. He had not spent a night free of dreams in which the strange creature of the carving existed, either in the foreground or ever aware on the rim of his dream. He had dreamed of subterrene places and of cities beneath the sea; he had seen himself in the Carolines and in Peru; he had walked by dream under leering gambrel-roofed houses, in legend-haunted Arkham; he had ridden in strange seagoing craft to places beyond the reaches of the known oceans. The carving, he knew, was a miniature, for the creature was a great protoplasmic being, capable of changing shape in myriad ways. Its name, said Wecter, was Cthulhu; its domain was R'lyeh, an awesome city far under the Atlantic. It was one of the Great Old Ones, who were believed to be reaching from other dimensions and far stars, as well as from the seas depths and pockets in space for reestablishment of their ancient dominion over earth. It appeared accompanied by amorphous dwarfs, clearly sub-human, which went before it playing strange pipes making music of no known parallel. Apparently the carving, which had been made in very ancient times, very probably before any kind of human record was kept, but after the dawn of mankind, by artisans in the Carolines, was a "point of contact" from the alien dimension inhabited by the beings which sought return.
I confess that I listened with some misgivings, noticing which, Wecter stopped talking abruptly, rose, and brought the octopoidal carving from the mantel to his desk. He put it down before me.
"Look at that carefully, now, Pinckney. Do you see anything different about it?"
I examined it with care, and announced finally that I could see no alteration.
"It doesn't seem to you that the extended tentacles from the face are—let us put it—'more extended?'"
I said it did not. But even as I spoke I could not be certain. The suggestion is all too often father of the fact. Was there an extension or not? I could not say then; I cannot say now. But plainly Wecter believed that some extension had taken place. I examined the carving anew, and felt again that curious revulsion I had first experienced at noticing the similarity between the sculptures of Smith and this curious piece.
"It doesnt strike you, then, that the ends of the tentacles have lifted and pushed out further?" he pressed.
"I cant say it does.
"Very well." He took the carving and restored it to its place on the Mantel.
Coming back to his desk, he said, "I'm afraid you'll think me deranged, Pinckney, but the fact is that ever since I've had this in my study, I've been aware of existing in what I can only describe as dimensions different from those we commonly know, dimensions, in short, such as those I've dreamed about. For instance, I have no memory of having written these reviews; yet they are mine. I find them in my script, in my proofs, in my column. I know, in short, that I and no one else wrote these reviews. I cannot publicly disown them, though I realize very well that they contradict opinions set down over my signature many times before this. Yet it cannot be denied that there is a curiously impressive logic running through them; since reading them—and, incidentally, the indignant letters I have received about them—I have given the matter some study. Contrary to the opinions you may have heard me express previously, the work of Bogdoga does have a relationship to a hybrid form of early Carolinian cult-art, and the third Symphony of Harris does have a marked and disturbing appeal to the primitive, so that one must ask whether their initial offensiveness to traditionally sensitive or cultured peo pie is not an instinctive reaction against the primitive which the inner self instantly acknowledges."
He shrugged. "But that's neither here nor there, is it, Pinckney? The feet is that the carving you found in Portland has exercised an irrationally disturbing influence on me to such an extent that I am sometimes not sure whether it has been for the best or not."
"What kind of influence, Jason?"-
He smiled strangely. "Let me tell you how I feel it. The first night I was aware of it was that immediately after you left it here. There was a party here that evening, but by midnight the guests were gone, and I was at my typewriter. Now then, I had a prosaic piece to do—something about a little piano recital by one of Fradelitski's pupils, and I got it off in no time at all. But all the time I was aware of that carving. Now, I was aware of it on two planes; the one was that on which it came into my possession, as a gift from you, an object of no great size, and clearly three-dimensional; the other was an extension—or invasion if you like—into a different dimension, in relation to which I existed in this room against the carving as a seed to a pumpkin. In short, when I had finished the brief notice I wrote I had only the odd illusion that the carving had grown to unimaginable proportions; for a cataclysmic instant I felt that it had added concrete being, that it was reared up before me as a colossus against which I stood as a pathetic miniature. This lasted but a moment; then it withdrew. Note that I say it withdrew; it did not just cease to exist; no, it seemed to compress, to draw back, precisely as if it were drawing out of this new dimension to return to its actual state as it must exist before my eyes—but as it need not exist before my psychic perception. This has continued; I assure you, it is not an hallucination, though I see by your expression that you are thinking I've taken leave of my senses."
It was not as bad as that, I hastened to assure him. What he said was either true or it was not; the presumptive evidence, based on the concrete facts of his strange reviews, indicated that he was sincere; therefore, for Jason Wecter, what he said was true. It must therefore have meaning and motivation.
"Postulating that everything you say is true," I said at last, cautiously, "there must be some reason for it. Perhaps you're working too hard, and this is an extension of your own subconscious.”
"Good old Pinckney!" he exclaimed, laughing.
"Or, if it is not, it must then have some motivation—from outside."
His smile vanished; his eyes narrowed. "You concede that, do you, Pinckney?"
"Presumptively, yes.”
"Good. So I thought after my third experience. Twice I was perfectly willing to lay to sensory illusion; three times, no. The hallucinations experienced as a result of eye-strain are seldom as elaborate as that, tend to be limited to imaginary rats, dots, and the like. So then, if this creature belongs to a cult in that it is the object of worship—and I understand that its worship extends into our own day, though secretly—there seems to be but one explanation. I return to what I said before—that carving is a focal point of contact from another dimension in time or space; granting that, then plainly the creature is attempting to reach through to me."
"How?" I asked bluntly.
"Ah, I am not a mathematician, not a scientist. I am only a music and art critic. That conclusion represents the outside limits of my extra-cultural knowledge."
The hallucination had appeared to persist. Moreover, it had had an existence in his sleeping hours on yet another plane in that, during sleep, Wecter accompanied the creature of the carving without difficulty into other dimensions outside our own space and time. Consistent illusions are not rarities in medical case-histories, nor are those which develop progressively, but such an experience as Jason Wecter s was clearly more than illusory, since it extended insidiously into his very thought patterns. I mused on this for a long time that night, turning over and over in my mind everything he had told me about the Elder Gods, the Great Old Ones, the mythological entities and their worshippers, into the culture pattern of which Wecter s inter- est had penetrated with such disturbing results for him.
Thereafter I watched the Dial apprehensively for Jason Wecter s column.
Because of what he wrote in the intervening ten days before I saw him again, Jason Wecter was soon the talk of cultural Boston and the surrounding countryside. Surprisingly, by no means all the talk about him was condemnatory, though the expected points-of-view were present; that is, those who had supported him previously were outraged and now condemned him; those who had previously scorned him now supported him. But his judge ments of concerts and art shows, though completely awry to my eyes, were no less razor-sharp; all his customary incisiveness and invective were present, his keenness of perception seemed not altered save in that he perceived things now, as it were, from a different perspective, a perspective radically altered from his past point-of-view. His opinions were startling and often outrageous.
The magnificent and ageing prima donna, Madame Bursa-DeKoyer,was "a towering monument to bourgeois taste, which, unfortunately, is notburied under it."
Corydon de Neuvalet, the rage of New York, was "at best an amusing imposter, whose Surrealistic sacrileges are displayed in Fifth Avenue shop windows by shopkeepers whose knowledge of art is somewhat less than an amount necessary to be seen under a microscope, though in his sense of colour he is tenth-best Vermeer, even though he never challenges even the least of Ahapi.”
The paintings of the insane artist Veilain excited his extravagant admiration. "Here is evidence that someone who can hold a brush and who knows colour when he sees it can see more in the world around him than most of the benighted who look upon his canvases. Here is genuine perception, uninhibited by any terrestrial dimensions, unhampered by any mass of human tradition, sentimental or otherwise. The appeal is to a plane which stems from the primitive, yet rises above it; the background is in events of the past and present which exist in conterminous folds of space and are visible only to those gifted with extra-sensory perception, which is perhaps a property of certain people adjudged 'insane.'"
Of a concert by Fradelitski of the conductors current favourite, the Russian symphonist, Blantanovich, he wrote so scathingly that Fradelitski publicly threatened suit. "Blantanovich's music is an expression of that dreadful culture which supposes that every man is the precise political equal of every other, save those who are at the top, who are, to quote Orwell, 'more equal;' it need not be played at all and would not be if it were not for Fradelitski, who is distinguished indeed among conductors, for in the entire world, he is the only one who learns progressively less with each concert he conducts."
It was not to be wondered at that Jason Wecters name was on every tongue; he was inveighed against; the Dial could not begin to publish the let ters received; he was praised, complimented, damned, cast out from social circles to which he had hitherto always had invitation; but above all, he was talked about, and whether on one day he was called a Communist and on the other a die-hard reactionary seemed to make no difference to him, for he was seldom seen anywhere but at the concerts he had to attend, and there he spoke to no one. Yet, he was seen at one other place: at the Widener, and later it was reported that he had twice been seen in the rare book collection of Miskatonic University at Arkham.
Such was the situation when, on the night of August twelfth, two days before his disappearance, Jason Wecter came to my apartment in a state which I should have judged at best to have been one of temporary derangement. His look was wild, and his talk even more so. The hour was close to midnight, but the night was warm; there had been a concert, and he had heard half of it, after which he had gone home to study in certain books he had managed to take from the Widener. From there he had come by taxi to my apartment, bursting in on me as I was getting ready for bed.
"Pinckney! Thank heaven you re here! I telephoned, but couldn't get ananswer.”
"I just came in. Take it easy, Jason. There's a scotch and soda over on thetable; help yourself."
He bolted a glass with far more scotch than soda in it. He was shaking, not just in his hands, and his eyes were feverish, I thought. I crossed and put a hand to his forehead, but he brushed it brusquely away.
"No, no, I'm not sick. You remember that conversation we had—about the carving?"
"Quite clearly."
"Well, it's true, Pinckney. It's all true. I could tell you things—about what happened at Innsmouth when the government took over that time in 1928 and all those explosions took place out at Devil Reef; about what happened in Limehouse, London, back in 1911; about the disappearance of Professor Shrewsbury over in Arkham not so very many years ago—there are still pockets of secret worship right here in Massachusetts, I know, and they are all over the world."
"Dream or reality?" I asked sharply.
"Oh, this is reality. I wish it were not. But I have had dreams. Oh, what dreams! I tell you, Pinckney, they are enough to drive a man mad with ec stasy to wake to this mundane world and to know that such outer worlds exist! Oh, those gigantic buildings! Those colossi towering there into those alien skies! And Great Cthulhu! Oh, the wonder and beauty of it! Oh, the terror and evil! Oh, the inevitability!"
I went over and shook him, hard.
He took a deep breath and sat for a moment with his eyes closed. Then he said, "You dont believe me, do you, Pinckney?”
"I'm listening. Belief isn't important, is it?”
"I want you to do something for me.”
"What is it?”
"If something happens to me, get hold of that carving—you know the one—and take it out somewhere, weight it, and drop it into the sea. Preferably—if you Can make it—off Innsmouth."
"Look, Jason, has someone threatened you?”
"No, no. Will you promise?”
"Of course."
"No matter what you may hear or see or think you hear or see?”
"If you wish.”
"Yes. Send it back; it must go back.”
"But tell me, Jason—I know you've been pretty cutting in your notices during the past week or so—if anyone's taken it into his head to get back at you. . . .”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Pinkey. It’s nothing like that. I told you you woudn’t believe me. It’s carving—it’s reaching farther and farther into this dimension. Can’t you understand, Pinkey? It’s begun to materialize. Two nights was the first time —I felt its tentacle
I withheld comment and waited.
“I tell you, I woke from sleep and felt its cold, wet pulling away the bedclothes; I felt it against my bod —I sleep, you know, without any covering but the bedding, I leapt up, I put on the light —and there it was,real, something I could see as well as feel, withdrawing now, diminishing in size, dissolving, fading —and then it was gone, back into its own dimension. In addition to that, for the past week or so I’ve been able to hear things from that dimension —that fluted music, for instance, and a weird whistling sound.”
At that moment I was convinced that my friend’s my had cracked. “If the carving has that effect on you, why don’t you destroy it? I asked.
He shook his head. "Never. Thats my only contact with outside, and I assure you, Pinckney, its not all dark over there. Evil exists on many planes, you know.”
"If you believe, aren't you afraid, Jason?”
He leaned towards me with his glittering eyes fixed on mine. "Yes," he breathed. "Yes, I'm horribly afraid—but I'm fascinated, too. Can you understand? I've heard music from outside; I've seen things over there—beside them everything in this world of ours palls and fades. Yes, I'm horribly afraid, Pinckney, but I will not willingly allow my fear to stand between us."
"Between you and who else?”
"Cthulhu!" he whispered
At this moment he raised his head, his eyes far off. "Listen!" he said softly. "Do you hear it, Pinckney? The music! Oh, that wonderful music! Oh, Great Cthulhu!" And he rose and ran from my apartment, an expression of almost beatific bliss on his ascetic features.
That was my last sight of Jason Wecter.
Or was it?
Jason Wecter disappeared on the second day thereafter, or during the night of that day. He was seen by others, though not to talk to, since his visit to my apartment, but he was not seen later than the following night, when a neighbour, coming in late, saw him by the light of his study window, apparently working at his typewriter, though there was no trace of any manuscript to be found, nor had anything been mailed to the Dial for publication in his column in that paper.
His instructions in case of any untoward accident clearly called for my "ownership" of the carving described in detail as that of a "Sea God: Ponape Origin"—quite as if he had wished to conceal the identity of the creature depicted there; so presently, with the sanction of the police, I repossessed my property, and prepared to do with it as I had promised Wecter I would do, though not before I aided the police in substantiating their deduction that none of Wecter's clothing was missing, that he had apparently risen from his bed and vanished stark naked.
I did not particularly examine the carving when I removed it from Wecter's house, but simply put it into my capacious brief-case and carried it home, having already made arrangements to drive to the vicinity of Innsmouth on the following day and throw the object, duly weighted, into the sea.
That was why it was not until the last moment that I saw the revolting change which had taken place. It should be borne in mind that I did not actually see anything in the process of its taking place. But there is no gainsaying the fact that I did on at least two occasions previously carefully examine the carving in question, and one of those times was at the special behest of Jason Wecter to observe fancied alterations which I could not see. And what I did see I must confess to seeing in a rocking launch, while I heard a sound which can only be described as of someone's voice calling my name as from an unfathomable distance, far far away, a voice like that of Jason Wecter, unless the excitement of that moment served to derange my own sense.
It was when I took the already weighted carving out of my brief-case, sitting far out to sea off Innsmouth in the launch I had borrowed, that I was first aware of that distant and incredible sound which resembled a voice calling my name, and which seemed to come from below me, rather than from above. And it was this, I am certain, which halted my action long en