BEING THE MANUSCRIPT OF ANDREW PHELAN (The controversial Phelan Manuscript, found in the room from which Andrew Phelan so strangely vanished during the night of September i, 1938, has at last been conditionally released for publication by the library of Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts, which had re- quested it from the Boston police files. It is reproduced here by express permission of Dr. Llanfer of the library staff, with the exception only of certain deletions whose suggestiveness was too terrible, and whose con- cepts too alien to contemporary mankind to permit of publication.)
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"Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos} and of his own place in the seething vortex of time; whose merest mention is paralyzing. He must; too, be placed on guard against a specific; lurking peril which} though it will never en- gulf the whole race; may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it."
H. P. LOVECRAFT
IT WOULD NOT BE IN error to maintain that my recent experiences were a direct outgrowth of the advertisement in the Personals column of The Saturday Review, for the advertisement was unusual and provocative. I saw it first on a day when I was not certain from what source my next weeks board and lodging were coming; it was unpretentious, but there was in it a curious note of challenge which I found it difficult to ignore. I read down the column and came back to it.
"Young man of brawn, brain, and limited imagination. If with modicum of secretarial ability, apply to 93 Curwen Street, Arkham, Mass., for information which may be of monetary advantage.”
Arkham was only a few hours from Boston—an old city whose clustering gambrel roofs had once concealed hunted witches, whose changelessness lent itself to strange tales of haunts and legends, whose narrow streets along the Miskatonic River were sentient with the very presence of past centuries, of people who had lived there and had been dust for long decades—and it was pleasant to find myself once more within its boundaries early that June evening. I had philosophically packed all such worldly goods as I felt might be necessary to keep me in the position—if I suited the advertiser—until I myself knew that I could fill it to my own satisfaction; and I carried them in one stout suitcase, which I checked at the bus station immediately on my arrival there. After a light repast, I sought out a city directory and ascertained the identity of the inhabitant of 93 Curwen Street, whose name was given as Dr. Laban Shrewsbury.
Acting on the intuitive conviction that Dr. Shrewsbury might be a person of some consequence, I took myself to the reference rooms of Miskatonic University and made inquiry, as a result of which I was directed not only to a local file on him, but also to a book he had written and published two years ago. The file was informative to an exceptional degree; I learned that Dr. Shrewsbury was a student of mysticism, a lecturer in occult sciences, a teacher of philosophy, an authority on myth and religious patterns of ancient peoples. His book, I am ashamed to confess, was far less informative; it was in large part beyond me. It bore the forbidding title of An In- vestigation into the Myth-Patterns of Latter-day Primitives with Especial Reference to the R'lyeh Text, and the merely cursory glances which I was able to give it con veyed nothing whatever to me, save the fact that my prospective employer was engaged upon some kind of research which ought, if not precisely within my sphere, to be at least not uncongenial to me. Armed with this information, I set out for Curwen Street.
The house I sought differed little from other houses on its street; indeed, it had so similar an aspect that it might have been one of a row all designed by the same unimaginative architect and constructed by the same builders. It was large without giving the appearance of largeness; its windows were casement windows, and small; its many gables receded into roofs that seemed to sway and sag; and it was weather-stained without having the appearance of being in sore need of paint. Moreover, it was set between gnarled trees, both of an indeterminate age, but seemingly quite ancient, older in fact than the house, which had about it an aura of age that was almost tangible. At this time of the day—the hour was that last hour of dusk, when the deeper twilight invades country lanes and city streets like a kind of just perceptible smoke—the house had an almost sinister appearance, but this I knew to be the inevitable effect of the ever-changing light.
There was no glow from any of the windows, and I stood briefly on the stoop wondering whether I might have chosen an inopportune time to call on my prospective employer. But I had not, for even as I raised my hand to knock, the door swung open, and I found myself facing an elderly man who wore his hair long and white, but had neither moustache nor beard, thus revealing a firm, almost prognathous chin, half-pursed lips, and a strong Roman nose. His eyes were not visible at all, for he wore dark glasses with shields which prevented one from seeing his eyes even from the side.
"Dr. Shrewsbury?”
"Yes. What can I do for you?”
"My name is Andrew Phelan. I came in answer to your advertisement in The Saturday Review."
"Ah. Come in. You re just in time.”
I did not attach any significance to this cryptic statement, other than to assume that he had been expecting someone else—as indeed he had, for so he soon informed me—and wished only to say that I came in good time for an interview, before his expected visitor turned up. I followed him into a dimly-lit hall, so feebly illumined that I had to go cautiously lest I stumble, and presently found myself in the old mans study, a high-ceilinged room which contained many books, not only on shelves, but strewn all over on floor, chairs, and the old mans desk. The professor waved me to a chair and himself sat down at his desk. He began immediately to ply me with questions.
Could I read Latin and French? Yes, I could read both languages with some facility. Could I box and did I know jiu-jitsu? Happily, I had some knowledge of both. He seemed particularly concerned about my imagination, and repeatedly asked curious questions which seemed designed to reveal to him whether I could be easily frightened, never once asking me directly. He explained that he had occasion to pursue his studies in strange, out-of-the-way places, and was often put in some personal danger from roughs and thugs, and for that purpose he required a secretary-companion who would act as a bodyguard should the necessity—admittedly remote— arise. Could I transcribe conversation? I believed I could do so reasonably well. He hoped I was familiar with certain dialects, and seemed gratified when I revealed that I had studied philology at Harvard.
"You may wonder," he said then, "at my insistence about lack of imagination, but my researches and experiments are of so outre a character that a too-imaginative companion might well be able to grasp enough of the fundamentals to suspect the cosmic revelations which might come of my work. Candidly, I must take precautions to prevent anything of that nature from happening."
I had been aware for some time of something vaguely disquieting about Dr. Shrewsbury; I could not ascertain what it was, nor what basis it had in my awareness. Perhaps it was that I could obtain no glimpse of his eyes; certainly it was disconcerting to be faced by those opaque black glasses which gave no hint of sight; but it did not seem to be that; it seemed rather to be something that was almost psychic and, had I been given to an easy submission to intuition, I would have withdrawn. For there was something markedly strange here; I needed no imagination to sense it; there was an aura of fear and awe about the room in which I sat, oddly incongruous with the musty smell of books and old papers, and there was above all an insistent and absurd impression of being in a place apart and away from all other human habitation, like a house of dread in a remote forest, or a place of insecurity in a borderland between darkness and daylight instead of a prosaic old dwelling along one of the river streets in ancient Arkham.
Quite as if he sensed this incipient doubt lodged in my mind, my prospective employer delivered himself of some reassurance in the disarming way in which he spoke of his work, seeming to ally us against the predatorily curious world which inevitably imposes upon scholars and savants, and casts over all their work and thought the insidious rust of doubt and disparagement. It was because of this, he said, that he preferred to work with someone like myself, who came to him free of any prejudice and would shortly be protected against prejudice.
"Many of us search in strange places for strange things," he said, "and there are aspects of existence about which even the great of our time have not yet dared to speculate. Einstein and Schrodinger have come close among the scientists; the late writer Lovecraft came even closer." He shrugged. "But now, to business.”
Forthwith he made me an offer of remuneration so tempting that it would have been folly even to hesitate about its acceptance; and I did not. At once upon my acceptance, he gravely cautioned me to speak to no one of anything that might actually happen or seem to happen in this house—"For things are not always as they seem," he explained enigmatically—and to know no fear within myself, even if no explanation of events was immediately forthcoming. He would expect me to occupy a room in the house; moreover, he would greatly like to have me begin work at once, as soon as my bag had been got from its place of storage—and this would be sent for—because he wished as much as possible of the conversation with his expected visitor transcribed. The transcription must be made from the adjoining room, or from another place of concealment, since it was doubtful if his visitor would speak if he suspected the presence of anyone other than his host, who had had the greatest difficulty in persuading him to come up from the port of Innsmouth and pay him this visit.
Giving me no opportunity to ask questions, but placing at my disposal pencils and paper, and showing me where I must conceal myself—behind an ingeniously contrived peephole at one of the book-cases—the professor took me upstairs to a small, cramped gable room which was to be mine for the duration of my association with him. It was flattering, I vaguely felt, to have been graduated from a mere secretary-companion to an associate, but I had little time in which to ponder this, for I had hardly returned to the floor below when the professor observed that his visitor must be near.
Hardly had he spoken, when the heavy door resounded to the thud of the knocker and the professor, motioning me to my place of concealment, went to open it and admit his nocturnal visitor.
When my employer first mentioned his coming visitor, I had naturally assumed that it would be someone engaged in similar research; therefore I was utterly unprepared for the sight of the professor s guest that I had from my peephole; for he was by no means the kind of individual I would have expected to see in Dr. Shrewsbury's house. He was still a man on the sunny side of middle age, but this fact was not immediately apparent, for he was swarthy of skin, so swarthy, indeed, that I took him for a lascar, and it was not until he began to speak that I identified him as of South American origin. He was clearly a sailor, for his garb was nautical, and it was obvious that this was not his first visit with the professor, though equally clear that it was his first call at the house on Curwen Street.
There was a colloquy in tones too low for my hearing, but this was evidently not meant for me, since it was not until the two of them were seated in the professors study that Dr. Shrewsbury raised his voice to normal volume, and his visitor did likewise. The conversation I then transcribed was as follows:
"I wish you would tell me from the beginning, Senor Fernandez, what took place last summer.”
(Apparently disregarding this suggestion, the sailor broke into his narrative in a curious but not illiterate mixture of Spanish and English at a point where he must have dropped it earlier.) "It was night, very black. I was separated from the party, and all the time I walk, walk, I do not know where ...”
"You were somewhere in the vicinity of Machu Picchu, according to your map?”
"Si. But I do not know where, and afterward you know, we could not find the place or even the way I took. But then, it rained. There I was walking in the rain, and then I thought I heard music. It was strange music. It was like Indian music. You know, the old Incas lived there, and they had ...”
"Yes, yes. I know those things. I know about the Incas. I want to know what you saw, Senor Fernandez.”
"I walk all the time, I dont know in what directions or anything, but it seemed to me the music was getting louder, and then one time I thought it was just in front of me, but when I walk that way, I come to a bluff I could feel it was solid stone. I walk around a little way, feeling along it. Then the lightning flashed, and I saw it was a high hill. Then it happened. I dont know how to say it. Suddenly the hill did not seem to be there, or perhaps I was somewhere else, but I swear I had drunk nothing, I was not delirious, I was not ill. I fell down on something, and I was in a doorway—it was rocks that had the shape of a doorway, and there was black water down there, and Indians half-dressed, you know the way they used to dress in the old days of the Conquistadores, and there was something in that lake. That was where this music was coming from.”
"The lake?”
"Si, Senor. From inside the water and from the outside too. There was music of two kinds. One kind was like opium, it was so sweet and intoxicating; the other was by the Indians—it was wild pipe-music, it was not good to hear."
"Can you describe what you saw in the lake?”
"It was big." (Here he paused, his brow furrowed.) "It was so big I do not know how to say it. It seemed to be as big as a hill, but of course, that cannot be. It was like jelly. All the time it changed its shape. Sometimes it was tall. Sometimes it was squat and fat with tentacles. It made a kind of whistling or gurgling sound. I do not know what the Indians were doing with it.”
"Were they worshipping it?”
"Si, si. That could be it." (He seemed excited.) "But I do not know what it was.”
"Have you ever gone back there?”
"No. I thought I was followed that time. Sometimes I think so still. We looked next day. Somehow I found my way back to the camp in the night, but we could find nothing."
"When you say you thought you were followed, do you know by what?"
"It was by one of the Indians." (He shook his head thoughtfully.)
"It was like a shadow. I dont know. Maybe not.”
"When you saw those Indians, did you hear anything?”
"Si, but I could not understand. It was not in any language I knew, only in part their own language. But there was one word, perhaps a name....”
"Yes? Go on, please.”
"Shooloo.”
"Cthulhu!”
"Si, si." (He nodded vigorously.) "But for the rest—it was just shouting and screaming, I do not know what it was they said.”
"And the thing you saw in the lake—do you know the amor– phous horror god of the ocean depths, Kon, Lord of the Earthquake, of the pre-Inca people?"
"Si.”
"Was the thing in the lake in the semblance of Kon?”
"I do not think so. But Kon had many faces, and what I saw came out of the water.”
"Was it like the Devourer, the War-God of the Quichua? I take it you have seen the Chavin Stone?”
"Our party examined it many times before we went into the Inca country. It is in the National Museum at Lima. We went from there to Abancay and into the Andes for Cuzco, then into the Cordillera de Vilcanota to Ollantaytambo. Then to Machu Picchu."
"If you examined it, you must have noticed that the diorite slab depicts serpents issuing from various parts of the Devourer s body. Now in regard to the jelly-like mass you saw in the subterranean lake, did it not also have appendages on its body?"
"Not serpents, Senor. It is only seldom that Viracocha is so shown. But, like the thing in the lake, he represents the sea also, as did Kon. Many people say that Viracocha means 'White Foam of the Waters.'"
"But it had appendages? That's the point I wish to make."
"Si!"
"Were you in the vicinity of the fortress of Salapunco when this happened to you?"
"We had gone beyond it. You know how the land is there. The fortress is on the right bank of the river. It is very large, but it is differently constructed from most, since it is built of large trapezoid granite blocks of graded size and a shape that is uniform, all evenly placed and fitted, without use of mortar. The rampart is almost fifteen feet high, and faces the river. It is below this place, in the terrible and deep gorges of the granite mountains, where lived the Quichua-Ayars who built the strange deserted city of Machu Picchu, which stands on the summit of a rocky promontory in a loop of the river. Almost on all sides of it is the deep canyon. We were then approaching this place when we made the camp that night. Two of us did not want to go, one wished to go to Sacsahuaman instead. But most of us had set out for Machu Picchu."
"About how far in miles were you from Salapunco?”
"Perhaps a mile, two miles. We were in the low country, and the place was very rocky, though trees and bushes grew thick there.”
At this point in the conversation, an extremely curious incident took place which terminated it. Dr. Shrewsbury, his lips half-opened to ask a further question, was suddenly made aware of something beyond my own consciousness; his head gave an imperceptible jerk, as if he had heard something; his lips firmed shut; he got up and said with pressing urgency to his guest that he must leave with the utmost secrecy, and he must take elaborate care not to be seen on his return to Innsmouth; and, so saying, he conducted him posthaste to the rear entrance. Hardly had the door closed behind the sailor, before Dr. Shrewsbury was back.
"Mr. Phelan, in a few moments a gentleman will call and ask for Fernandez. When the knocker sounds, answer the knock; tell him you have not seen Fernandez, you do not know who he is, you know no one of that name."
I had no time to take issue with such orders; in any case, it was not my place to do so; I yielded to Dr. Shrewsbury's outstretched hand and placed my transcription in it even as the knocker s sound echoed through the house. My employer nodded curtly; I went to the door and opened it.
Never have I felt such extreme and immediate revulsion as I did at the sight of the man on the stoop. There was, admittedly, no streetlight for some distance, and the light which flowed from the hall was so dim as to be more confusing than helpful, but I am prepared to swear that not only was there a grotesquely batrachian aspect about the fellows face—irrationally and yet perhaps not inappropriately, there flashed into mind at once the oddly fascinating depiction by Tenniel of the frog footman of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland—but that his fingers, where one hand rested upon the iron rail of the stoop, were webbed. Moreover, he exuded an almost overpowering odor of the sea—not that smell so commonly associated with coastal areas, but of watery depths. One might have thought that from his oddly wide mouth there would issue sounds as repulsive as his aspect, but on the contrary, he spoke in flawless English, and inquired with almost exaggerated politeness whether a friend of his, one Senor Timoto Fernandez, had called here.
"I have no acquaintance with Senor Fernandez," I answered.
He stood there for a moment, giving me a contemplative stare which, had I been prey to imaginative fear, would most certainly have chilled me; then he nodded, thanked me, bade me good night, and turned to walk away into the foggy darkness.
I returned to the professors study. Without looking up from the transcription he held in his hands, Dr. Shrewsbury asked me to describe our inquiring caller. I did so, omitting no detail of his attire as I had seen it in the uncertain light, and not forgetting to mention also my curious revulsion at sight of him.
He nodded, smiling grimly. "They are everywhere, those creatures," he said cryptically. But he offered no explanation of this singular incident. Instead, he went on to suggest a reason for his interest in the account of the sailor Fernandez.
No doubt it occasioned some question in my mind, he said, in regard to his patient delving, but it had long ago seemed apparent that there might well be a connection between certain forms of worship in the great plateaus of unknown central Asia, notably that of Leng, a hidden and secret place, and that of older and more primitive cultures on other continents—some of which doubtless survived in various forms to this day.
"Kimmich, for instance, asks where the Chimu civilization of Khmer came from if not remote places within what is now China? And the Dravidians who were driven out of parts of India by Aryans and went to Malaysia and Polynesia, later to mix with these same whites, and move eastward as far as Easter Island and Peru, must have brought with them certain strange rites and worship patterns. In short, it has come to me increasingly that there is a fundamental relationship among many ancient cultures and religious beliefs of which we have only a fragmentary knowledge; at the moment, my concern is the possible dual role of the war-god of the Quichua-Ayars, the Devourer, and the survival of a monstrous, pre-human time, the water-being, Cthulhu, worship of whom seems to have forbidding roots even into the present, so strongly embedded, indeed, among certain sects little known to man, that there is a profoundly intense and consciously malignant determination to keep from the rest of the world any knowledge which might lead to exposure before the time which these devotees of strange cults consider propitious for the coming again of Cthulhu."
He talked in this vein for some time, and most of what he said was beyond me, as perhaps he suspected it might be, though he did not elaborate. However, it was patent to me that his concern for the sailor Fernandez was occasioned by his knowledge of the habits of the cultists, of whom presumably—though Dr. Shrewsbury did not say so—our second caller had been one. Nevertheless, for all his vagueness and the generalities of his monologue, I could not help being conscious of a concept that embodied not only a paralyzing vastness, since the worship of pre-human eras was involved, but also a numbing fright in the incredible horrors and demonic myth-patterns it suggested. That the professor feared for the life of the sailor Fernandez seemed obvious, though he never said as much directly; yet he told of the London scholar, Follexon, who was drowned inexplicably in the Thames off Limehouse, shortly after he had announced himself as on the trail of important disclosures relative to certain ancient survivals in the East Indies; of the presumably accidental death of the archaeologist, Sir Cheever Vordennes, after the discovery of certain black monoliths in Western Australia; of the curious illness which removed from the terrestrial scene—after the publication of tales purporting to be fiction, and revealing progressively more and more about the Cthulhu-Nyarlathotep-Great Old Ones cults, particularly the hellishly revelatory novel, At the Mountains of Mad- ness, hinting at strange terrible survivals in the arctic wastes—that great modern master of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft.
But there was one aspect of that singular evening about which Dr. Shrewsbury said nothing, ignoring it as if it did not exist; nor did I myself think of it until after I had made three copies of the transcribed conversa tion at the professors direction, and had retired to my room, when it came to me while I lay turning over in my mind the strange events into which I had so blindly plunged. I had had evidence of a certain power possessed by my employer almost at once and had not recognized it; before I had knocked, he had opened the door to me. And again, he had somehow seemed to sense the approach of Fernandez. But even more startling was his curious, inexplicable divination of the approach of the caller who came to inquire about the sailor. How had he become aware of him? Perhaps he had developed a supersensory ability which enabled him to hear sounds such as footsteps beyond the ken of the average mortal. But even so, even if he had heard the footsteps of the oncoming pursuer, how could he have known his purpose?
Deeply perplexed, I pondered this puzzle late into the night, only to fall asleep at last with no intimation of its solution, and hazily aware of the incredibly ancient atmosphere of the house in which I had now taken up my abode, an atmosphere that burgeoned with mystery and age, and inescapably, an aura of dread.
2
UNDOUBTEDLY THE FIRST of those strange dreams in the house on Curwen Street was the result of what my employer found in the papers he sent me out to get late in the following day, after I had spent hours with him assimilating material he had previously gathered from all corners of the earth. He had told me that he very seldom left the house; that indeed most of the residents of Arkham were not even aware of his existence, and he said that I would frequently be required to run such little errands for him. Ordinarily he took no paper, save The New York Times; the mere affairs of the mundane world, even the shaping of events toward another catastrophical war in Europe, were of no moment to him; but on this day he sought a particular piece of information which he was certain might be found in the pages of the Innsmouth Courier or the Newhuryport Correspondent; if not in the local papers.
But it was from the Innsmouth paper that he finally clipped a brief, pointed little article and handed it to me with instructions to file it together with my transcription of the previous nights conversation. The article, which was suggestive and frightening in the light of what the professor had hinted in his final monologue the night before, read:
The body of a sailor who fell to his death from the docks ruined by Federal agents in the winter of 1928 was recovered this noon in the vicinity of Devil Reef A native reported the accident early this morning, saying that the sailor seemed to be walking in the company of or just ahead of a companion, who had disappeared, however, when the local residents reached the spot. Stories of a struggle in the water and certain references to webbed hands are generally considered the product of a bottle. The sailor was identified as one Timoto Fernandez, late of the Chan-Chan, out of Trujillo.
The implications of this casual article were ominous; yet there was no word from the professor. Clearly he had expected something of the kind; his interest in it did not smack of regret, but only of a kind of casual, philosophic acceptance; he added no comment whatever to it, and his entire attitude forbade any inquiry from me. Yet it had an ultimate effect on him, for after an hours study of the conversation transcript, he found among his papers a detailed map of Peru, and before this he sat for another hour, carefully scrutinizing the Andean country in the region of the ruins of Machu Picchu, Cuzco, the Salapunco fortress, and the Cordillera de Vilcanota, finally marking off a small area between the fortress and the site of Machu Picchu.
Doubtless it was my observation of this singularly intent and soundless study which was in part responsible for the extraordinary dream of that night—the first of that astonishing sequence—for immediately following his examination of the map, my employer betrayed an odd eccentricity and decreed that we should both retire, though the night was