I BEING THE DESPOSITIO OF ABEL KEANE
1
Abel Keane . . . Abel Keane “
Sometimes I am constrained to speak my name aloud, as if to reassure myself that all is as before, that indeed I am Abel Keane; and I find myself walking to the mirror and looking at myself, scrutinizing the familiar lineaments for any sign of change. As if there must be change! As if surely, some time, change must come, the change that marks the experiences of that week. Or was it but a week? Or less? I do not any longer have assurance of anything.
It is a terrible thing to lose faith in the world of daylight and the night of stars, to feel that at any time all the known laws of space and time may be abrogated, may be thrust aside as by some sorcery, by ancient evil known only to a few men, whose voices are indeed voices crying in the wilderness.
I have hesitated until now to tell what I know of the fire which destroyed a great portion of a certain seaport town on the Massachusetts coast, of the abomination which existed there, but events have dictated that skinned, and lithe; he was clothed in loose-flowing robes of a material foreign to me, and he wore sandals made from the leather of some beast whose identity was unknown to me. Though it was evident that he carried various articles in the pockets of that strange clothing, I did not examine them. He was in a sleep so deep that it was impossible to awaken him, and evidence showed that he had virtually fallen across the bed and had gone instantly to sleep.
I discovered at once that there was something familiar about his features— familiar with that strange insistence so commonly associated with people whom one has known before, perhaps casually, but nevertheless has known. Either I had my visitors acquaintance, or I had seen his picture somewhere. It occurred to me at this point that I might well attempt to learn his identity while he slept, and accordingly I drew a chair up to the bed and sat down beside my visitor, intending to practise auto-suggestion, which I had learned from indulgence in my lesser professional existence—for, while working my way through divinity school, I appeared thrice weekly on public and occasionally on private stages as an amateur hypnotist, and some small study of the human mind had enabled me to accomplish various trivial successes in mind-reading and allied matters.
However, deep as his sleep was, he was aware.
I cannot explain this even now, but it was as if, though his body slept, his senses did not, for he spoke as I leaned above him, motivated by my intention; and he spoke out of a patent awareness which must be related to his strange way of life about which I learned later, a development from a supersensory Existence.
"Wait," he said. And then, "Be patient, Abel Keane.”
And suddenly a most curious reaction was manifest within myself; it felt precisely as if someone or something had invaded me, as if my visitor spoke to me without words to tell me his name, for his lips did not appear to move, yet I was distinctly aware of the impression of words. "I am Andrew Phelan. I left this room two years ago; I have come back for a little while." Thus directly, thus simply, I knew; and I knew too that I had seen Andrew Phelans likeness in the Boston papers at the time of his utterly outre disappearance from this very room two years previously, a disappearance never satisfactorily explained.
Excitement possessed me.
without imparting to me more information about the mystery which had remained unsolved for two years. Rashly, I sprang up and threw myself between him and the door.
He looked at me with calm, amused eyes.
"Wait!" I cried. "You cant go like this! What is it you want? Let me get it for you.”
He smiled. "I seek evil, Mr. Keane—evil that is more terrible than anything taught in your school of divinity, believe me.”
"Evil is my field, Mr. Phelan.”
"I guarantee nothing," he replied. "The risks are too great for ordinary men.”
An insane impulse took possession of me. I was seized with the urgent desire to accompany my visitor, even if it became necessary to hypnotize him. I fixed his strange eyes with mine, I reached out my hands—and then something happened to me. I found myself suddenly on another plane, in another dimension, as it were. I felt that I had taken Andrew Phelans place on the bed, and yet accompanied him in spirit. For instantly, soundlessly, painlessly, I was out of this world. Nothing else would describe the sensations I experienced for the remainder of that night.
I saw, I heard, I felt and tasted and smelled things utterly alien to my consciousness. He did not touch me; he only looked at me. Yet I apprehended instantly that I stood on the edge of an abyss of horror unimaginable! Whether he led me to the bed or whether I made my own way there I do not know; yet it was on the bed that I found myself in the morning after those memorable hours of the remainder of that night. Did I sleep and dream? Or did I lie in hypnosis and know because Phelan willed me to know all that took place? It was better for my sanity to believe that I dreamed.
And what dreams! What magnificent and yet terror-fraught images wrought by the sub-conscious! And Andrew Phelan was everywhere in those dreams. I saw him in that darkness making his way to a bus station, taking a bus; I saw him in the bus, as if I sat beside him; I saw him alight at ancient, legend-haunted, and shunned Innsmouth, after changing buses at Arkham. I was beside him when he prowled down along that wrecked waterfront with its sinister ruins—and I saw where he paused, before that disguised refinery, and later at that one-time Masonic hall which now bore over its doorway the curious legend: Esoteric Order of Dagon. And yet more—I witnessed the begin
“Ill see to it that you're not disturbed.”
Even as I spoke, I had made up my mind what to do; I was determined that Andrew Phelan would not put me off so easily, and there was one course left open to me—I could discover certain things for myself Despite his caution, my visitor had dropped hints and suggestions. Even beyond them, however, there was the mystery of Andrew Phelan itself; that had been extensively recorded in the daily papers of that time; certainly in those accounts I might expect to discover some clue. I adjured Phelan to make himself comfortable, and departed, ostensibly for the college; but instead, once outside, I telephoned to excuse myself from that day's study. Then, after a light breakfast, I took myself off to the Widener Library in Cambridge.
Andrew Phelan had said that he had come from Celaeno. This hint was too patent for me to overlook; so forthwith I set myself to track down Celaeno. I found it sooner than I had expected to find it—but it solved nothing. If anything, it served only to deepen the mystery of Andrew Phelan.
For Celaeno was one of the stars in the Pleiades cluster of Taurus!
I turned next to the files of the newspapers concerning Phelan's vanishing, early in September, 1938.1 hoped to discover in the accounts of this remarkable disappearance without trace from out the window of that same room to which he had now returned, something to lead me to some feasible explanation. But as I read the accounts, my perplexity deepened; there was a singularly complete puzzlement expressed in the newspapers. But there were certain dark hints, certain vague and ominous suggestions which fastened to my awareness. Phelan had been employed by Dr. Laban Shrewsbury of Arkham. Like Phelan, Dr. Shrewsbury had spent some years in a strange and never-explained absence from his home, to which he had returned as queerly as now Andrew Phelan had come back. Shortly before Phelan's disappearance, Dr. Shrewsbury's house, together with the doctor himself, had been destroyed by fire. Phelan's tasks had apparently been secretarial, but he had spent a good deal of his time in the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham.
So it seemed to me that the only definite clue offered to me at the Widener was in Arkham; for the records of the Miskatonic University Library should certainly reveal what books Phelan had consulted—presumably in the interests of the late Dr. Shrewsbury. Only an hour had now of learned and scholarly paragraphs concerning the lore of the Arab, most of them utterly beyond my comprehension—I came upon a certain reference which imparted to me, in the light of what small experience I had already had, a frightening chill and a feeling of the utmost dread. For, as I scanned the pages with their enigmatic allusions to beings and places utterly alien to me, I found in the midst of a quotation purporting to be from another book entitled the R'lyeh Text, the following: "Great Cthulhu shall rise from R'lyeh} Hastur the Unspeakable shall return from the dark star which is in the Hyades near Aldebaran . . . Nyarlathotep shall howl forever in the darkness where he abideth} Shub- Niggurath shall spawn his thousand young . . .”
I read—and read again. It was incredible, damnable—but for the second time within twenty-four hours, I had come upon reference to unbelievable spaces, and to stars—to a star in the Hyades, a star in Taurus—and surely it could be none other than Celaeno!
And, as if in mocking answer to the question which loomed so large before me, I turned over this manuscript, and found below it a portfolio labeled in a strong, if spidery hand: Celaeno Fragments! I drew it toward me, and found it sealed. At this, the aged attendant, who had been observing me closely, came over.
"It has never been opened," he said.
"Not even by Mr. Phelan?”
He shook his head. "Since it came by Mr. Phelans hand, with Dr. Shrewsbury's seal on it, we do not believe he had access to it. We do not know."
I looked at my watch. Time was passing now, and I meant to go on to Innsmouth before I completed my day. Reluctantly, and yet with a strange sense of foreboding, I pushed away the manuscripts and books.
"I will come again," I promised. "I want to get to Innsmouth before too much of the day has gone.”
The attendant favored me with a curious and reflective gaze. "Yes, it is better to visit Innsmouth by day," he said finally.
I pondered this while the old man gathered up the papers and books. Then I said, "That is surely a curious statement to make, Mr. Peabody. Is there anything wrong with Innsmouth?”
"Ah, do not ask me. I have never gone there. I have no desire to go there. There are strange things enough in Arkham, without the need for going on
I did not yield to that prompting, but climbed into the bus, which I shared with but one other passenger, whom I knew instinctively to be an Innsmouth resident, for he, too, had a strange cast of features, with odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck, a narrow-headed fellow who could not have been more than forty, with the bulging, watery blue eyes and flat nose and curiously undeveloped ears which I was to find so shockingly common in that shunned seaport town toward which the bus soon began to roll. The driver, too, was manifestly an Innsmouth man, and I began to understand what Mr. Peabody had meant when he spoke of the Innsmouth people as seeming somehow "not like people." To the end of comparison with that following figure of my dream, I scrutinized both my fellow-passenger and the driver as closely, if furtively, as I could; and I was somewhat relieved to come to the conclusion that there was a subtle difference. I could not put my finger on it, but the follower of my dream seemed malign, in contrast to these people, who had merely that appearance so common to cretins and similar unfortunate individuals bearing the stigmata of lower intelligence in the realm of the sub-normal more especially than that of the abnormal.
I had never before been to Innsmouth. Having come down from New Hampshire to pursue my divinity studies, I had had no occasion to travel beyond Arkham. Therefore, the town as I saw it as the bus approached it down the slope of the coast-line there, had a most depressing effect on me, for it was strangely dense, and yet seemed devoid of life. No cars drove out to pass us coming in, and of the three steeples rising above the chimneypots and the crouching gambrel roofs and peaked gables, many of them sagging with decay, only one had any semblance whatsoever of use, for the others were weatherbeaten, with gaps in them where shingles had been torn away, and badly needed paint. For that matter, the entire town seemed to need paint—all, that is, save two buildings we passed, the two buildings of my dream, the refinery and that imposing pillared hall standing among the churches which clustered about the radial point of the towns streets, with its black and gold sign on the pediment, so vividly remembered from my experience of the previous night—the Esoteric Order of Dagon. This structure, like that of the Marsh Refining Company along the Manuxet River, seemed to have been given a coat of paint only recently. Apart from this, and a single store of the First National chain, all the buildings in what was appar
His reaction was instantaneous. Nor was it entirely unexpected. He became agitated, he glanced fearfully toward the entrance to the store, and then came over to seize me almost roughly by the arm.
"We dont talk about such things here," he said in a harsh whisper.
His nervous fear was only too manifest.
"I'm sorry if I distressed you," I went on, "but I'm only a casual traveller and I'm curious as to why such a potentially fine port should be all but abandoned. Indeed, it is virtually abandoned; the wharves have not been repaired, and many business places seem closed.”
He shuddered. "Do they know you are asking questions?”
"You are the first person to whom I have spoken.”
"Thank God! Take my advice and leave town as soon as you can. You can take a bus...”
"I came in on the bus. I want to know something about the town.”
He looked at me indecisively, glanced once more toward the entrance, and then, turning abruptly and walking along a counter toward a curtained door which apparently shut off his own quarters, he said, "Come along with me, Mr. Keane.”
In his own rooms at the rear of the store, he began, however reluctantly, to talk in harsh whispers, as if he feared the very walls might hear. What I wanted to know, he said, was impossible to tell, because there was no proof of it. All was talk, talk and the terrible decay of isolated families, intermarrying generation after generation. That accounted in part for what he called "the Innsmouth look." It was true, old Captain Obed Marsh held commerce with the far corners of the earth, and he brought strange things—and some said, strange practices like that seafarers' kind of pagan worship called the Esoteric Order of Dagon—back to Innsmouth with him. It was said that he held stranger commerce with creatures that rose in the dark of the moon out of the deep sea beyond Devil Reef and met him at the reef, a mile and a half out from shore, but he knew of no one who had seen them, though it was said that in the winter of the year when the Federal Government had destroyed the waterfront buildings, a submarine had gone out and discharged torpedoes straight down into the unfathomable depths beyond Devil Reef. He spoke persuasively and well; perhaps indeed he knew no more, but I felt undeniably the lacunae in his story—the unanswered questions being inherent in all that he said.
ply disappeared, and at other times had undergone strange reversions to primitive and pagan ceremonies in their worship.
Everything he said was disturbing far beyond anything within the limits of my experience. And yet, what he said was not nearly so terrifying as what remained only implied in his words—the vague hints of terrifying evil, of evil from outside; the hideous suggestiveness of what had taken place between the Marshes and those creatures from the deep, the lurking unvoiced assumption of what went on at the meetings of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Something had happened here in 1928, something terrible enough to be kept out of the press, something to bring the Federal Government down to the scene and to justify the havoc wrought along the oceans edge in the wharf district of this old fishing town. I knew enough Biblical history to know that Dagon was the ancient fish-like god of the Philistines, who rose from the waters of the Red Sea, but there was ever present in my thoughts the belief that the Dagon of Innsmouth was but a Active mask of that earlier pagan god, that the Dagon of Innsmouth was the symbol of something noxious and infinitely terrible, something that might account not only for the curious aspect of the Innsmouth people, but also for the fact that Innsmouth was shunned and forsaken, let alone by the rest of the towns in its vicinity, and forgotten by the outside world.
I pressed the storekeeper for something definite, but he could not or would not give it; indeed, he began to act, as time wore on, as if I had already been told far too much, his agitation increased, and presently I thought it best to take my leave, though Hendreson implored me not to carry on any overt investigation, saying at the last that people had been known to "drop out of sight, and the Lord alone knows where. Nobody ever found a clue as to where they went, and I reckon nobody ever will. But they know." On this sinister note I took my leave.
Time did not permit much further exploration, but I managed to walk about a few of the streets and lanes of Innsmouth near the bus station, and found everything in a state of curious decay, and most of the buildings giving off besides that familiar odor of old wood and stone, a strange watery essence as of the sea. Farther I could not go, for I was disturbed by the queer glances given me by the few inhabitants I passed on the streets, and I was ever conscious of being under surveillance from behind closed doors and window curtains; but most of all, I was horribly aware of a kind of aura of their secret followers among men and beasts, whose task it is to prepare the way for their second coming, for it is their evil intention to come again and rule the universe as once they did after their breaking away and escape from the domain of the Ancient Ones. What he told me then evoked frightening parallels to what I had read in those forbidden books at the library of Miskatonic University only that afternoon, and he spoke in a voice of such conviction, and with such assurance, that I found myself shaken free from the orthodox learning to which I had been accustomed.
The human mind, faced with something utterly beyond its ken, inevitably reacts in one of two ways—its initial impulse is to reject in toto, its secondary to accept tentatively; but in the dread unfolding of Andrew Phelans explanation there was the damnable, inescapable fact that only such an explanation would fit all the events which had taken place since his strange appearance in my room. Of the abominable tapestry of explanation which Phelan wove, several aspects were most striking, and at the same time most incredible. Dr. Shrewsbury and he, Phelan said, had been in search of the "openings" by means of which Great Cthulhu might rise from where he lies sleeping "in his house at R'lyeh," an undersea place, Cthulhu apparently being amphibious; under the protection of an ancient, enchanted five-pointed carven grey stone from ancient Mnar, they need not fear the minions who served the Great Old Ones—the Deep Ones, the Shoggoths, the Tcho-Tcho people, the Dholes and the Voormis, the Valusians and all similar creatures— but their activities had finally aroused the superior beings directly serving Great Cthulhu, against whom the five-pointed star is powerless; therefore, Dr. Shrewsbury and he had taken flight by summoning from interstellar spaces strange bat-like creatures, the servants of Hastur, Him Who Is Not To Be Named, ancient rival of Cthulhu, and, after having partaken of a golden mead which rendered them insensible to the effects of time and space and enabled them to travel in these dimensions, while at the same time heightening their sensory perceptions to an unheard-of extent, they set out for Celaeno, where they had resumed their studies in the library of monolithic stones with books and hieroglyphs stolen from the Elder Gods by the Great Old Ones at, and subsequent to, the time of the revolt from the benign authority of those Gods. Nevertheless, though on Celaeno, they were not unaware of what took place on earth, and they had learned that commerce was again being carried on between the Deep Ones and the calling out to the Federals. I have come out of the sky to watch and prevent horror from being spawned again on this earth. I cannot fail; I must succeed.”
"But how?”
"Events will show. Tomorrow I am going to Innsmouth where I will continue to watch until I can take action.”
"The storekeeper told me that all outsiders are watched and regarded with suspicion.”
"But I will go in their guise.”
All that night I lay sleepless beside Andrew Phelan, torn by the desire to accompany him. If his story were the figment of his imagination, surely it was a glorious and wondrous tale, calculated to stir the pulse and fire the mind; if it were not, then with equal certainty, it was as much my responsibility as it was his to lay hands upon and destroy the evil at Innsmouth, for evil is the ancient enemy of all good, whether as we who are Christians understand it or whether as it is understood in some prehistoric mythos. My studies in divinity seemed suddenly almost frivolous in contrast to what Phelan had narrated, though I confess that at that time I still entertained doubts of some magnitude, for how could I do else? Were not the monstrous entities of evil Phelan conjured up well-nigh impossible to conceive, to say nothing of expecting belief in them? Indeed they were. Yet it is mans spiritual burden that he finds it so easy to doubt, always to doubt, and so difficult to believe even in the simplest things. And the striking parallel which forced itself upon me, a divinity student, a parallel which could not be overlooked, was plain—the similarity between the tale of the revolt of the Great Old Ones against the Elder Gods, and that other, more universally known tale of the revolt of Satan against the forces of the Lord.
In the morning I told Phelan of my decision.
He shook his head. "It is good of you to want to help, Abel. But you have no real understanding of what it means. I've given you only a spare outline— nothing more. I would not be justified in involving you.”
"The responsibility is mine.”
"No, the responsibility is always that of the man who knows the facts. There is far more even than Dr. Shrewsbury and I already know to be mouth comparatively free of observation, we must be made up to look as much like the Innsmouthers as possible.
In the late afternoon of that day, Phelan set to work. I discovered in a very short time that he was a consummate artist with his hands; my features began to change utterly—from a rather innocuous-looking, and perhaps even weak-appearing young fellow, I aged skillfully and began to assume the typical narrow head, flat nose, and curious ears so common to the Innsmouth people. He worked over my entire face; my mouth thickened, my skin became coarse-pored, my color vanished behind a grey pallor, horrible to contemplate; and he managed even to convey a bulging and batrachian expression about my eyes and to give my neck that oddly repellant appearance of having deep, almost scaly creases! I would not have known myself, after he had finished, but the operation took better than three hours, and at the end of that time it was as permanent as it could be expected to be.
"It is right," he decided after he had examined me, and then, tirelessly, without a word, he set about to give himself a similar appearance.
Early the next morning we left the house for Innsmouth, entraining for Newburyport, and thus coming into Innsmouth on the bus from the other side, a deliberate maneuver on Phelans part. By noon of that day we were established, amid a few interested and curiously searching glances from the slovenly workers in the place, in the Gilman House, Innsmouth s lone open hotel—or rather, in what was left of it, for, like so many buildings in the town, it was in a very bad state of decay. We registered as Amos and John Wilken, cousins, for Phelan had discovered that Wilken was an old Innsmouth name not at present represented by any member of the family living in that accursed seaport city. The elderly clerk in the Gilman House had given us a few sharp-eyed glances, and his bulging eyes stared at the names on his register. "Related to old Jed Wilken, be ye?" he asked. My companion nodded briskly. "Man can see ye belong here," the clerk said, with an almost obscene chuckle. "Got business?”
"Were taking a little vacation," answered Phelan.
"Come to the right place, then, ye did. Things to see here, all right, if ye re the right kind “
Again that distastefully suggestive chuckle.
Once alone in our room, Phelan became more tense than ever. "We've possible to see his eyes, for they were concealed by spectacles of a deep cobalt hue, and his mouth, while in many ways similar to that of the natives, was yet different in that it seemed to protrude more, doubtless because Ahab Marsh's chin receded almost into nothingness. He was, literally, a man without a chin, at sight of which I experienced a shudder of horror unlike any I had before undergone, for it gave him an appearance so frighteningly ichthyic that I could not but be repelled by it. He seemed also to be earless, and wore his hat low on what appeared to be a head devoid of hair; his neck was scrawny and, though he was otherwise almost impeccably dressed, his hands were encased in black gloves, or rather, mittens, as I saw at second glance.
We were not observed. I had gazed at our quarry only in the most apparently casual manner, while Phelan did not look directly at him at all, but utilized a small pocket mirror to examine him even more indirectly. In a few moments Ahab Marsh had vanished into his car and driven away.
"A hot day for gloves," was all that Phelan said.
"I thought so.”
"I fear it is as I suspected," Phelan added then, but this he would not explain. "We shall see.”
We repaired to another section of the city to wander through Innsmouths narrow, shaded streets and lanes, away from the region of the Manuxet River and the falls, close to which the Marsh Refinery rose on a little bluff. Phelan walked in deep and troubled contemplation; it was evident that he was in puzzled thought, which I did not interrupt. I marvelled at the incredible state of arrested decay so prevalent in this old seaport town, and even more at the curious lack of activity; it was as if by far the majority of the inhabitants rested during the day, for very few of them were to be seen on the streets.
The night in Innsmouth, however, was destined to be different.
As darkness came, we made our way to the Order of Dagon Hall. At his one previous visit, Phelan had discovered that entrance to the hall for the ceremonies could be had only by display of a curious fish-like seal, and during the time I had tried to trace his movements here, he had fashioned several of them, of which the most perfect he had reserved for his own use, and that most closely resembling it he held for me, if I cared to use it, though he preferred that I take no such risk and remain outside the hall.
This, however, I was unwilling to do. It was patent that a great many pied the center of the dais, the hall was bare of everything in the way of decorations— nothing but rickety chairs, a plain table on the dais, and those tightly curtained windows to offset the effect of those alien bas-reliefs and sculptures, and this lack of everything only served to heighten their hideousness.
I glanced at my companion but found him gazing expressionlessly straight before him. If he had examined the bas-reliefs and sculptures, he had done so less openly. I felt that it would not be wise any longer to stare at those oddly disturbing ornaments; so I followed Phelans example. It was still possible, however, to notice that the hall was rapidly filling up with more people than the events of the day would have persuaded me to believe still lived in the city. There were close to four hundred seats, and soon all were filled. When it became evident that there were still others to be seated, Phelan left his seat and stood up against the wall near the entrance. I did likewise, so that a pair of decrepit oldsters, hideously changed in appearance from the younger element—for the creases at their necks h