BEING THE TESTAMENT OF CLAIBORNE BOYD
(The manuscript of Claiborne Boyd, now in the vaults of the Library of the University of Buenos Aires, is in three parts. The first two parts were discovered among the effects of Claiborne Boyd left behind in a hotel room in Lima, Peru; the final portion is a piecing together of various letters— delivered to Professor Vibberto Andros of Lima—and of related accounts. The entire manuscript has been released for limited publication only after prolonged discussion among its custodians.)
1
IT IS SINGULARLY FORTUNATE that the ability of the human mind to correlate and assimilate facts is limited in relation to the potential knowledge of the universe even as we know it—to say nothing of what lies beyond. Fortunate because the earths teeming millions, save but for an infinitesimal number, live on blissfully unaware of the dark depths of horror which yawn eternally not only in strange, out-of-the-way places of the earth, but often just beyond the sunset or around the next corner—the yawning chasms in time and space, and the inconceivably alien things which occupy those terrible lacunae.
Less than a year ago I was engaged upon a leisurely study of Creole culture, residing in New Orleans and making occasional trips from that city into the bayou country of the Mississippi Delta region, which was not far from the town of my birth. I had been following this pursuit for perhaps three months when word reached me of the death of my great-uncle Asaph Gilman, and of the shipment—at his express direction as contained in his will—of certain of his property to me, as "the only student" remaining among his few living relatives.
My great-uncle had been for many years Professor of Nuclear Physics at Harvard, and, following his retirement because of age from that University, he had taught briefly at Miskatonic University in Arkham. From this last post he retired to his home in a suburb of Boston and began to live out his last years in an almost reclusive fashion; I write "almost," because he broke his seclusion from time to time to make strange, secretive trips into all corners of the world, on one of which—while poking about certain unsavory districts of Limehouse, in London—he had met his death—a sudden riot of what appeared to be lascars or dacoits from ships in dock involving him and dissipating as suddenly as it had begun, leaving him dead.
I had had occasional communications from him, written in a spidery hand and dispatched from various points at which he had touched—from Nome, Alaska, for instance, and Ponape in the Carolines, from Singapore, Cairo, Cregoivacar in Transylvania, Vienna, and many more places. At the beginning of my research into Creole backgrounds, I had received a cryptic postcard sent from Paris, bearing on its face a fine etching of the Bibliotheque Nationale, and on the reverse a directive from Great-Uncle Asaph: "If you come upon any evidence of pagan worship past or present, in your study, I would be obliged if you would collect all data and send it along to me at your earliest convenience." Since, of course, the Creoles among whom I studied were largely Roman Catholic in religion, I encountered no such data as he sought; so I did not write to the address in London he gave. Indeed, before I had planned to write to him at all, word of his untimely death reached me.
My great-uncle s effects followed notice of his death a fortnight later— two steamer-trunks filled to capacity, if their weight were any indication. At the time of their arrival I was busy assimilating primary facts about customs and folklore of the Creole country, and for that reason it was well over a month before I thought to open the trunks and make at least a cursory examination of their contents. When I did finally open them, I discovered that their contents could be divided readily into two parts—a collection of extremely curious "pieces" which would have been the delight of any collector of aboriginal art, and a sheaf of notes, some typewritten, some in my greatuncles spidery script, some merely clippings and letters.
Obviously because the aboriginal art lent itself most readily to scrutiny, I gave some time to it immediately. After perhaps four hours spent in an effort at some arrangement, I came to the conclusion that the pieces my greatuncle had so painstakingly collected represented a strange kind of creative progression. My own knowledge of such aboriginal art was comparatively limited, but my great-uncle had attached adequate notes to the bottoms or backs of most of the pieces, save the patently self-explanatory ones, such as the common types of Polynesian masks, for instance.
The division of the pieces into groups was in itself interesting. There were approximately two hundred and seventy-seven of them, making allowance for two or three which might have broken in such a way as to resemble two pieces rather than one. Of this number, probably a quarter of a hundred were of American Indian origin, and a like number of Canadian Indian and Eskimo origin. There were a few scattered pieces which were clearly of Mayan design, and there were a score of Egyptian craftsmanship. Approximately a hundred pieces came out of the African heartland, and two score or so from Oriental sources. Almost all the remainder—and therefore the majority from any one source—were South Pacific in origin, from Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Australia. Apart from these, there were perhaps half a dozen pieces, the origin of which was admittedly unknown. These pieces were all extremely unusual, and, though differing widely in a superficial fashion from one another, there seemed to be connecting links between them, as if some obscure development had occurred in common in all the racial and culture patterns represented, such links as suggested certain basic similarities between the hideous carvings of the South Pacific and the repellant totems of the Canadian Indians, for instance; and of this odd relationship, my great-uncle had certainly been aware, as his notes indicated. But, disappointingly, there was nowhere any clear indication of the underlying thesis of my great-uncle's research insofar as these curious art works were concerned.
My great-uncle had clearly lavished most of his care upon the South Pacific pieces, which were not, I saw at a glance, the customary mask-varieties, though his notes were not in themselves too expository, and it was only in the light of later events that some clarification of the "art" and of his appended notes occurred to me. Among the South Pacific pieces were several which caught my eye at once. In the order of their impingement upon my awareness, they were as follows, with appended notes:
1) A human figure surmounted by a bird. "Sepik River, New Guinea. Reverse said to exist, but great secrecy attending. Uncollected.”
2) A piece of Tapa cloth from the Tonga Islands, the design a dark green star upon a brown background. "First occurrence of the five-pointed star in this area. No other relation. Natives unable to account for design; say it is very old. Evidently no contact here, since it has lost meaning.”
3) Fisherman's God. "Cook Islands. Not the familiar fishing canoe effigy. Note lack of neck, misshapen torso, tentacles for legs and/or arms. No name given by natives.”
4) Stone tiki "Marquesas. Exciting batrachian head of figure presumably man. Are fingers webbed? Natives, while not worshipping it, endow it with meaning, apparently fear association.”
5) Diminutive head. "Clearly a miniature of colossal stone images found on the outer slope of Rano-raraku. Typical Easter Island work. Found in Ponape. Natives call it simply 'Elder God.'”
6) Carved lintel. "New Zealand Maori. Exquisite workmanship. Central figures obviously octopoid, yet not an octopus, but a curious combination of fish, frog, octopus, and man.”
7) Carved door jamb (tale). "New Caledonia. Note suggestion of fivepointed star again!”
8) Ancestral figure. "Carved in tree fern. Ambrym, New Hebrides. Partly human, partly batrachian. If representation of true ancestor, some manifest relation to same cult as that of Ponape and Innsmouth. Mention of Cthulhu to owner frightened him; he seemed not to know why.”
9) Bearded mask. "Ambrym origin. Exciting suggestion of tentacles; not hair; as 'beard.' Similar use in Carolines, Sepik River country of New Guinea, and Marquesas. One such in shop in dock area of Singapore. Not for sale!"
10) Wooden figure. "Sepik River. Notice a) nose—a single tentacle curling down and into figure below waist; b) lower jaw—another tentacle curling down, rejoining torso at umbilicus. Head grotesquely out of proportion. Living model?”
11) War-shield. "Queensland. Maze design. Apparently a) maze under water; b) squat, anthropoid figure suggested at end of maze. Tentacles?”
12) Shell pendant. "Papua. Similar to above.”
It seemed manifest that my great-uncle sought some very definite tendencies in these pieces, but whether of the development of primitive art or of some object of representation was not clear. Presumably, however, it was the latter, for among the remaining pieces of unknown origin there were two which were extremely suggestive in the light of my great-uncles cryptic notes. One was of a rough, five-pointed star, made from some manner of grey stone unfamiliar to me; the other was an exquisitely made figure just over seven inches in height, representing nothing so much as the figment of a nightmare. It represented, certainly, some ancient monster, or, rather, an aboriginal concept of an ancient monster, doubtless long extinct if anything even remotely resembling it had ever walked the earth. The creature was suggestively anthropoid in outline, but its head was octopoid, and its face was a mass of feelers resembling tentacles, while its body appeared to be at one and the same time scaly and rubbery-looking. Its hind and fore feet had disproportionately large claws, and something which resembled bat-wings appeared to grow from its back. Because it was corpulent, and its face of a horrible malignance, the squatting figure had about it an unavoidable force—a vivid, unforgettable impression of great evil—not evil as it is commonly understood, but a terrible, soul-destroying horror transcending evil as mere men can know it. Its aspect was perhaps all the more fearful because the cephalopod head was bent forward, and the aspect of the squatting figure was that of a creature about to rise, as it were, to pounce forward. To its base, my great-uncle had pasted but one brief note, more puzzling than the others. It read only, "C.?—or some other?" Though my knowledge of such primitive art was, as I have admitted, comparatively slight, I was convinced that there was no link between the art of this strange figure and the known types of art with which I had the familiarity of any reasonably well-educated individual, and this conviction served to make my great-uncle s acquisition seem all the more mysterious.
There was likewise no clue to its origin—at least, as far as the figure itself was concerned. I sought this in vain, but nothing appeared save only my great-uncle s strange question. Moreover, there was about this figure the feeling and the look of vast, incalculable age; this was unmistakable, for the material out of which it had been fashioned was a greenish-black stone with iridescent flecks and striations which suggested nothing geologically familiar to me. Furthermore, there were presently apparent, along the base of the figure, certain characters which I had initially mistaken for carving marks; yet it seemed clear after prolonged examination that these characters were not the haphazard, slipshod scars of any carving tool, but rather carefully cut into the stone; they were, in fact, hieroglyphs or characters of some language which bore no more resemblance to known linguistics than the carving itself did to the known types of art.
Small wonder, perhaps, that I was soon persuaded to set aside my paper on the Creole culture and background in favor of some more extensive research into my great-uncle s papers. It seemed quite patent to me that, however secretive he might have been, he was on the track of something, and there were certain factors—notably his card inquiring about "pagan worship" among the Creoles, and his interest in the aboriginal pieces he had preserved—which tended to show that the object of his quest was very probably some form of ancient religion which he was attempting to trace back through the centuries in the remote corners of the world where its survival was far more likely than in the metropolitan centers of our own time.
My resolve, however, was far more easily made than carried out, for my great-uncles papers were in nothing at all resembling order or chronology. I had hoped, because of the comparative neatness of their piles in the trunks, that they were in at least reading order, but it took me a considerable time to effect any sort of even primary arrangement, and an even longer time to establish a sequence of a sort—though there was no assurance that that sequence was correct. Nevertheless, there was some reason to believe that if it were not, at least I could not be very far off, for my great-uncle s travel notes permitted of some dating, since it was possible to discover where he had travelled and what the order of his travels was. It was also possible to hit upon the original impetus of his travels, so unlikely a way for him to pass his last years, judging by his middle and earlier life.
It seemed quite probable that some experience, real or assimilated, assothe ciated with the two years during which he taught at Miskatonic University had set him off. But the immediate direction of his first travels apparently lay in a curious manuscript, which was evidently that of a castaway; how it had come into my great-uncle s possession I had no way of knowing, though it was probable that the short newspaper clipping attached to the manuscript might have put him on its trail. The clipping was but a brief account of the finding of a manuscript in a bottle; it was headed: LOST SHIP MYSTERY SOLVED. H.M.S. ADVOCATE SANK AT SEA! and read:
"Auckland, N. Z.: December 17—The mystery of H.M.S. Advocate; lost last August, appeared to be solved today with the discovery of a manuscript written by First Mate Alistair Greenbie. The manuscript was discovered in a bottle floating not far from the coast of New Zealand by a fishing crew. While it appeared to be in large part the raving of a mind already disordered by long exposure, the essential facts of the Advocate's foundering seem clear. After clearing Singapore, the ship was caught in the storm which swept down from the Kuriles in mid-August; it was at that time in S. Latitude 470 53', W. Longitude 1270 37'. The crew of the Advocate was forced to abandon ship ten hours after the storm struck, and while the storm was still raging. Thereafter, they were at the mercy of high seas, and, if Greenbie s account can be believed, of incredibly brutal pirates whose action decimated the men who remained alive as the boat bearing Greenbie and his companions drove for the shore of an island which was presumably one of the Gilbert or Mariana Islands. Such an island as that described by Greenbie, however, is not known to local navigators, who are inclined to cast doubt upon Greenbie’s account following the forced leave-taking of the ship.”
The manuscript itself was written on the relatively small sheets of a pocket notebook and was pinned together. Though thick in pages, it was written in a shaky hand, and there were not many words on the page. Nevertheless, it was of substantial length, considering that its writer was very probably suffering from exposure and more or less convinced that he was doomed to die at sea.
"I am all that is left of the crew of H.MS. Advocate; which set out from Singapore August 17th, this yean On the 21st we ran into a storm, S. Latitude 470 53', W. Longitude 1270 37', coming out of the north and blowing something terrible. Captain Randall ordered all hands to and we did our best, but could not stand up against the storm in a craft no more seaworthy than the Advocate. At the beginning of the sixth watch, ten hours after the storm hit us, the order came to abandon ship; she was settling fast; something had torn her on the port side; and it was no good trying to save her. We got off in two boats. Captain Randall was in charge of the one, which was the last off, and I was in charge of the other. Five men were lost getting away from the ship; the water was running higher than I ever saw it, and when the Advocate went down it was all the worse.
"We were separated in the dark, but we got together again next day. We had enough provisions to last a week, if we took care, and we figured we were somewhere between the Carolines and the Admiralties, closer to the latter and New Guinea; so we did what we could against the high seas to go in that direction. On the second day out, Blake got hysterical and caused an unfortunate accident; in the fight, the compass was lost. Since it was the only compass between the two boats, its loss was a serious matter. Nevertheless, we maintained, we thought, a course straight for the Admiralties or New Guinea, whichever showed up first, but after nightfall the first night we saw by the stars that we were off course by west. On the next night we were still off course, more so, if anything, but we could not be sure of our direction even after we had rectified the course, because clouds came up and covered the stars, all but the Southern Cross and Canopus, which would be seen just dimly behind the clouds for some time after the rest of them were down behind.
"We lost four more men in those days. Siddons, Harker, Peterson, and Wiles went out of their heads. Then, during the fourth night, Hewett, who was on watch, woke us all up with a loud yell; and, when we were awake, we heard what he had heard—yelling and crying—it sounded horrible—coming over the water from where we judged Captain Randalls boat was; but in a few minutes it was all over. We tried to hail them, but we could get no answer; if it had been one of the men going berserk, we would have heard. But there was nothing. After a while we didn't try any more, just waited for morning, all of us more or less afraid in the darkness, with those terrible cries still ringing in our ears.
"Then the morning came, and we looked for the other boat. We saw it, all right, but there wasn't a man to be seen aboard her. I ordered the boat to make for her, thinking perhaps there still were men lying down in her, but when we came up alongside, there was nothing, not a sign of anybody, except that the Captains cap was still lying there. I looked the boat over carefully. The only thing I noticed was that the gunwales looked slimy, from the outside in, just as if something had pushed up out of the water and trailed into the boat. I couldnt make anything out of that.
"We cut away from the boat, leaving her just as we found her. We were not strong enough to warrant pulling the extra weight, and there was nothing to be gained by it. We didn't know which direction we were going now, didn't know just where we were, but we still believed we were near the Admiralties. About four hours after sun-up, Adams gave a shout and pointed straight ahead, and there was land! We pulled for it, but it was farther off than we thought. It wasn't until late afternoon that we got close enough to see it fair.
"It was an island, but it wasn't like any I ever saw before. It was about a mile long, and, though it did not appear to have any vegetation on it, it seemed to have some kind of building in the middle of it; a big black stone pillar stuck up there, and down at the water's edge there seemed to be pieces of masonry. Jacobson had the glass, and I took it from him. Clouds were up and the sun was near to setting, but I could still see. The island didn't look right. It looked like mud, even the high ground. The building looked wrong, too. I thought the heat and the shortage of water was getting me, but just the same I said we wouldn't make for shore till next day.
"We never made for shore.
"That night it was Richardson's watch up to midnight, but he was too weak to take it; so Petrie took it and Simonds sat with him, in case one should fall asleep. We were all dog tired, having tried too hard to reach that land and overdoing it on the short rations we had, and we were all soon asleep. It seemed that we hadn't been asleep long when a yell from Simonds woke us. I was up quick as a cat and at his side.
"He was sitting there staring—his eyes wide and his mouth open—like a man in the extremity of fear. He babbled that Petrie was gone; that something had come up out of the water and just took him off the boat. That was all he had time for; that was all any of us had time for. The next minute they were all over us, coming up out of the water like devils, swarming up on all sides!
"The men fought like mad. I felt something tearing at me—like a scaly arm with a hand at the end of it, but I swear to God that hand had webbed fingers! And I swear that the face I saw was like a cross between a frog and a man! And the thing had gills) and was slimy to the touch!
"That is the last I remember of that night. Next thing something hit me; I think it was poor, fear-crazed Jed Lambert, and he probably thought he was hitting out at one of the things boarding us. I went down and I stayed down and that is probably what saved me; the things left me for dead.
"When I came to, it was day by some hours. That island was gone—I was far out, away from it. I drifted all that day, and night after, and this morning I put this down so that if I dont reach land, or if I am not sighted soon, I can put it into the bottle and hope and pray someone may find it and come back and get those things that took my men and Captain Randall and his men—for there is no doubt that is what happened to them, too—pulled out of their boat in the night by something from the lurking hells beneath these cursed waters.
"Signed, ALISTAIR H. GREENBIE
First Mate, H.M.S. ADVOCATE.”
Whatever the authorities in Auckland thought of Greenbie s statement, it is certain that my great-uncle viewed it with the utmost gravity, for, following in chronological sequence, there was a very large assortment of similar stories—accounts of strange, inexplicable happenings, narratives of unsolved mysteries, of curious disappearances, of all manner of outre occurrences which might be printed in thousands of newspapers and read with but the most superficial interest by the vast majority of people.
For the most part, these accounts were short; it seemed evident that the majority of the editors themselves utilized them only as "filler" material, and it doubtless occurred to my great-uncle that if the Greenbie statement could have been treated so cavalierly, then other items might have similar stories behind them. Now it should be made clear that the clippings so carefully gathered by my great-uncle were similar in only one particular—and that is their utter strangeness. Apart from this, there was no apparent simi
But my curiosity in regard to my employers strange absence soon gave way before another even stranger occurrence. I have hinted previously that there was about the old house on Curwen Street an aura almost as of dread; I had hardly got into bed, before I was acutely aware of this, even to the extent of imagining inimical hosts pressing upon the building from all sides, but particularly from that side of the house which faced the fog-bound Miskatonic River; moreover, I was only briefly conscious of this peculiar phenomenon, before I was even more sharply aware of something more, something even stranger. This was nothing less than an auditory illusion in that I heard or seemed to hear strange sounds which could not possibly have had an origin anywhere but within my subconscious; for there was no other rational explanation of the noises I now heard on the borderland of sleep. They began with the sound of footsteps—not steps along the walk outside of the house, nor along the floor or even the ground beneath my window, but steps that scraped and stumbled along what must certainly have been a rocky or stony path, for there were occasionally also the additional small noises of stones or rock fragments rolling and falling, and once or twice the distinct impression as of something striking water. How long these sounds lasted, I have no way of knowing; indeed, I grew so accustomed to them, despite their strangeness, that I lay in a condition of semi-sleep until I was brought bolt upright in bed by a thunderous detonation, followed by other explosive sounds, and the terrible urgency of crashing rocks and shale, succeeded by a bitter cry, "Too little! Too little!”
Now there was no possibility of hallucination save that arising from delirium; I was reasonably certain that I was not delirious; in fact, I got out of bed, went to the bathroom and got myself a glass of water. I returned to my bed once more, composed myself again for sleep, and distinctly heard a whistled ululation followed by a chanting voice saying those same mystic words of my first strange dream in the house: "Id! la! Hastur tfayak yvulgtmm} vugtlagln, vulgtmm! Ax! Ai! Hastur!" Then there was a great rushing sound, as of colossal wings, and then silence, complete and absolute, and no further sound impinging upon my consciousness save the normal sounds of the night in Arkham.
To say that I was disturbed is to diminish my reaction to insignificance. I was profoundly troubled, but even in my unnatural drowsiness, I could not help reflecting that on the first occasion of drinking Dr. Shrewsbury's mead,
On the third day of this work, the professor provided a startling little epilogue to the curious incident of the sailor Fernandez and his story. He was at the moment reading in The New York Times, when I saw a smile briefly touch his lips; he reached for a scissors and clipped an item which he handed to me, saying that I might add it to the file on Fernandez and mark the file Closed.
The item was of wire service origin, date-lined from Lima, Peru, and read:
A localized earth shock in the Cordillera de Vilcanota last night completely destroyed a rocky hill along the river between the deserted Inca city of Machu Picchu and the fortress of Salapunco. Senorita Ysola Montez, instructor at the Indian school which is kept in one room of the abandoned fortress, reported that the shock came with the force of an explosion, threw her out of bed, and aroused the Indians for many miles around. Despite the evidence of the shattered hill, which apparently collapsed into an underground river or reservoir doubtless stemming from the gorge, seismographs at Lima recorded no disturbance of the earth in the vicinity. Scientists are inclined to regard the incident as evidence only of a local collapse brought about by a weakening of the cavernous understructure of the hill below Salapunco. A number of Indians of the vicinity, whose presence at the scene has been unaccounted for, were killed.
3
IT WAS AGAIN A NEWSPAPER account which was responsible for the second, and also subsequently, for the last of those strange dreams I had in the house on Curwen Street. So long a time had passed since the previous dream—almost two months, for it was now mid-August—that I had come to look back upon that initial sleep-bound adventure as a remarkable effect of the house itself, the possible result of a change in my way of existence when I removed from Boston. Moreover, within the fortnight immediately past, Dr. Shrewsbury had begun the dictation of his second book, designed to follow An Investigation into the Myth-Patterns of Latter-day Primitives with Especial ity of increasing the tension between such followers of Cthulhu as those batrachian Deep Ones, who inhabit the many-columned city of Y'ha-nthlei deep in the Atlantic off the blasted port of Innsmouth, as well as sunken R'lyeh, and the bat-winged interplanetary travellers, who are half-man, halfbeast, and serve Cthulhu's half-brother, Him Who Is Not To Be Named, Hastur the Unspeakable; of setting against one another the amorphous spawn who serve the mad, faceless Nyarlathotep and the Black Goat of the Woods, Shub-Niggurath, and the Flame Creatures of Cthugha, among whom there exists eternal rivalry which might well be turned into devastating fury. Let the servants be in turn summoned to the aid of some enlightened brain, so that the openings for Cthulhu may be stopped by the aid of those air-beings serving Hastur and Lloigor; let the minions of Cthugha destroy the hidden places within the earth where Nyarlathotep and Shub- Niggurath and their hideous offspring dwell. Knowledge is power. But knowledge is also madness, and it is not for the weak to take arms against these hellish beings. As Lovecraft wrote, '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.'”
At this point, Dr. Shrewsbury had completed the first volume of his second book—a book never destined to be finished, though I did not know it then—and he directed me thereupon to complete my transcription in triplicate, proof, and ship the remaining manuscript to the printer, together with a check to cover the cost of production; for no publisher would risk money by bringing