BEING THE STATEMENT OF NAYLAND COLUM
(The manuscript of Nayland Colum, discovered in a bottle in Colums cabin by Captain Robertson of the Sana} is preserved in the British Museum; hitherto, publication has been denied, but since certain aspects of the manuscript appear to have bearing on recent events in the South Pacific, the manuscript has been released for publication.)
1
The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of
black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
-H.P. LOVECRAFT
There is so little time to set down what I must write, to leave this record of the strange events which began in London not so very long ago, so little time because even now the sea and the wind rage around the ship, and we are delivered to him because we are in his element—if indeed what I fear is true. I have held and the professor has said that there is no knowing, but what after all is truth and what is legend, and which parts of the one rightfully belong to the other.
There are legends which are older than man. How then, did we come by them, if there were not some intelligence apart from mans to bring them down? Man has modified them, changed them, fitted them into his own pattern. But the ancient writings remain, the age-old legends of the human race, the tales, vague and unconnected though they may be, of vast, cataclysmic events, of weird and terrible forces . . . and beings…
It began, as I have written, only several weeks ago in London, though time seems longer than that, so crowded with events was the interval between. My outre novel, The Watchers on the Other Side; had not long been published, but it had already achieved that kind of minor success which can come to a novel which is not quite socially-aware enough to be called serious and yet not wholly light enough to be classified as mere entertainment; critics had acclaimed it, book-reviewers had helped it along with mild praise, and the public, sated with the ordinary run of mysteries and puzzle novels, had taken it to their hearts with enthusiasm. I was, in fact, preparing to move from my comparatively humble flat in Soho, when, late one night, I was aroused from my desk, at which I was laboriously trying to piece together a second novel in the same vein, by a cautious knock on my door.
I rose, somewhat tiredly, and opened it to an elderly gentleman whose aspect was kind without being benign, and yet also grim without being menacing. His hair was long and white, but his face was clean-shaven; his nose was strongly Roman, his chin almost prognathous. His eyes I could not see, for he wore dark glasses with shields at the sides, thus completely concealing his eyes. Above his glasses, his brows were unruly and greying.
His voice, when he spoke, was cultured. "I am Professor Laban Shrewsbury, and I am looking for the author of The Watchers on the Other Side”
I stepped aside and said, "Come in, please.”
"Thank you, Mr. Colum.”
He came into my cluttered flat, seated himself, and without preamble, made himself comfortable by throwing back his cape-like coat, exposing a rather old-fashioned high collar and a flowing tie, and, folding his hands about the head of his cane, he began to speak.
"I should perhaps have written to ask whether I might call on you, Mr. Colum, but time is so short, and it occurred to me that the author of a book like yours would be adventurous enough by nature to understand. Do you mind if I ask you certain questions? Forgive me; I have already observed that you are at work on a new novel, meant to be a successor to The Watchers on the Other Side; and that it is not going well, I can guess. But it is just possible that I may be of some slight assistance to you in this regard—though not before some time has elapsed. But I should like now, if you do not object, to ask you a question or two about The Watchers on the Other Side “
"By all means," I said, curiously impressed by my visitor.
"Tell me, did you write that novel out of imagination alone?”
The question was perhaps a natural one. I smiled. "You are paying tribute to my poor skill," I said. "But, of course, the answer is no. I drew upon the ancient legends as much as possible.”
"And struck upon the kernel of truth?”
"In legends, Professor?" My smile held, even at the risk of giving offense to him.
"Every legend, all lore, has at basis some truth, however distorted it may be in the process of being handed down from one generation to the next. And there are those strange and provocative parallels in the legends of various peoples. You will have encountered them. But no matter. Tell me one other thing—have you always, since publication of your novel, felt entirely secure as to your person?”
"Of course!" I answered without hesitation, but an afterthought stirred me; there had been evenings…
"I think not," said my visitor with compelling self-confidence. "On several occasions you have been followed—or should I say 'stalked' by stealthy habitants of a world of which you never dreamed save in the fiction which flowed from your pen by such coincidence. You see, I know, Mr. Colum, because on two of those occasions I myself followed your followers. A pity you could not have seen them! You would not have been able to recall their like, and you would not have forgotten the disturbing batrachian aspects of their features and bodies.”
I stared at him in amazement. I had had the distinct impression that I was being followed on considerably more than one occasion. I had sought to dismiss it as the figment of my over-active imagination, but failed; so I had concluded at last that my followers were from among the dregs of Whitechapel, Wapping or Limehouse, and this, in turn, had inspired my determination to leave Soho behind.
Quite as if he read my thoughts, my visitor said, "But they would follow you wherever you went, Mr. Colum. I know.”
Strangely, I had the inexplicable conviction that he did know, that perhaps he alone might provide me with a means of escape.
"I know you are adventurous," he went on. "I know you are possessed of more than ordinary courage. I have some knowledge of your exploits on two exploring expeditions in which you took part. I do not, therefore, come unprepared. But, admittedly, these exploits and your adventurous nature are not sufficient to interest me of themselves; no, but in combination with the fact that it was you, Nayland Colum, who wrote The Watchers on the Other Side; these facts are important to my purpose. In a very modest sense, I, too, am an explorer—but my explorations are not of the more mundane kind. I am not concerned with the mysterious and hidden places of the earth except only superficially and insofar as they are connected to the areas outside in which my real interest lies. But there is hidden somewhere on this earth a place I must find, and I have only now settled upon a clue to the keeper of the key to this place.”
"In what region is it?" I asked.
"Could I be certain, I would not need to seek it. It might be in the Andes, it might be in the South Pacific, it might be in Tibet or Mongolia, it might be in Egypt or the deserts of Arabia. It might even be in London. But let me tell you for what I am seeking—it is the place of concealment where Cthulhu lies waiting to rise again and spread his spawn over the earth and perhaps its sister planets.”
"But Cthulhu is a legend—a creation of the imagination of the American writer Lovecraft!" I protested.
"You say so. So do others. But consider the parallels which exist—the representations of god-like beings of evil which are so strangely similar in the creative life of the natives of Polynesia and the Incas of Peru, the ancient inhabitants of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and the Aztecs of Mexico— there is no need to go on. No, do not interrupt me.”
He went on to speak of legends and ancient lore with a grimly forbidding earnestness and a persuasiveness which aroused, first, my doubts about their unreality, and at last my unwilling belief. He spoke of certain evil cults which had come down from pre-human eons, surviving in strange, out-ofthe- way places, servants of the Ancient Ones—almost inconceivable beings of dread who had fought against the Elder Gods in their far place among the stars of Orion and Taurus, and had been expelled to alien stars and planets— Great Cthulhu, waiting in sleep within some fastness which might be the sunken sea kingdom of R'lyeh; Hastur the Unspeakable, come from the Lake of Hali in the Hyades; Nyarlathotep, the fearful messenger of the Ancient Ones; Shub-Niggurath, the Goat With a Thousand Young, symbol of fertility; Ithaqua, ruler of the air, akin to the fabled Wendigo; Yog-Sothoth, the All-in-One and One-in-All, not subject to strictures of time or space, who was greater than all the other Ancient Ones—all dreaming in hidden places of the time when they can rise again against the Elder Gods and once more rule and command Earth and the sister planets and stars of the universe of which Earth is but an infinitesimal part. He spoke of the servants of the Ancient Ones—of the Deep Ones, the Voormis, the Abominable Mi- Go, the Shoggoths, the Shantaks; of the mysteriously unmapped lands of N'Kai, Kadath in the Cold Waste, Carcosa, and Y'ha-nthlei; of the rivalry between Cthulhu and Hastur and their followers….
And yet, somehow, I understood that he withheld more knowledge than he imparted. I listened in growing wonder, increasingly aware that there was about my visitor a strangely disquieting aspect which was evident even above the almost hypnotic compulsion of his voice and manner, the conviction his bearing and his words conveyed, an intuitively-perceived force which lent weight and authority to his quiet recital. I listened, listened without interruption while he mentioned the old books and mouldering papers which contained the clues to the reality behind the legends—the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, the Comte d'Erlette s Cubes des Goules, the R'lyeh Text, and finally the fabulously rare Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred.
He had been speaking of these hidden things, drawing upon some arcana of knowledge which was obviously his own because of an impressive amount of research, for some time, when abruptly he cut himself off in the middle of a sentence. He sat motionless, in an attitude of intent listening.
"Ah," he breathed quietly. Then he rose and took the liberty of putting out the light.
"Do you hear, Mr. Colum?”
I strained to listen in the pregnant darkness. Was it my imagination, or did I hear a curious shuffling sound, almost an uncertain hopping, moving out of the hall beyond my flat and down the steps?
"They have followed me here," said Professor Shrewsbury. "Come.”
He moved to a window overlooking the entrance to the building. I came to his side and together we looked down. Out of the building came not one but two strangely hunched figures, who seemed to shuffle and hop along, and passing under a misty light in the street, revealed oddly repellant features, ichthyic, if I were to judge.
"If I were to say to you," whispered Professor Shrewsbury at my side, "that there went two of the Deep Ones, would you still believe that I was the victim of my own wishful imagination, Mr. Colum?”
"I dont know," I answered, likewise in a whisper.
But I knew that what walked away into a London fog below was something incredibly evil; the aura of it seemed even now to linger in the street.
"How did you know they were here?" I asked suddenly.
"I knew it as well as I know this book"—he picked up a book from my desk, despite the darkness, "or this page of manuscript,"—this, too, he picked up, "or this pen. And even now, we have not been deserted, Mr. Colum, by no means. They have no intention of leaving us to our own devices. Perhaps they suspect my purpose, I do not know.”
"And what is your purpose?" I managed to ask, somewhat surprised at his uncanny vision in the darkness of an unfamiliar room.
"I need someone like you to accompany me in a search for the Keeper of the Key. I warn you that the course will be fraught with dangers, not only to the body, but to your very soul—that the instructions you will receive are bound to seem mad to you, but yet must be followed to the letter, without question—that we may very well not return.”
I hesitated. His challenge was direct and uncompromising. I did not for a moment doubt his sincerity or integrity. Where would he lead me? I wondered.
"We are bound for the port of Aden, Mr. Colum," he said. "But perhaps you would like some further evidence of my ability to see and foresee the dangers which beset us. Pray do not be alarmed, Mr. Colum; my powers are small at best, and yet they may be surprising." He put on the light, and, turning to me, took off his black spectacles.
My shock bordered momentarily on hysteria. The strangled cry that escaped me was lost in a terrified silence, while I fought for self-control. For Professor Laban Shrewsbury, despite having given me so convincing a demonstration of the excellence of his vision} had no eyes at all; where his eyes should have been there were only the dark pits of his empty sockets!
Quite calmly, he resumed his spectacles. "I am sorry to have disturbed your equanimity, Mr. Colum," he said quietly. "But you have not yet given me your answer.”
I tried to match his calmness with my own. "I will go, Professor Shrewsbury.”
"I was certain you would," he answered. "Now listen carefully—as soon as day breaks, you must undertake to secure your possessions against a long absence. We shall take every precaution against loss, but it is quite probable that you will not return for some time—months, perhaps a year, perhaps more. Does that upset you?”
"No," I replied, truthfully enough.
"Very good. We shall set out in two days from Southampton. Can younbe ready in that time?”
"I believe so.”
"Now I must tell you we have strange allies in our quest, Mr. Colum, and even stranger properties in combat." As he spoke, he took from his pocket a little phial of golden mead, which he pressed upon me. "Guard this carefully, for it has the property, taken in the smallest quantity, of extending the range of all your senses and of enabling your astral self to move about independently in your sleep." Next he gave me a small five-pointed star, which he identified as a kind of amulet which would assure my protection, as long as I carried it on my person, from all such beings as the Deep Ones, though it was powerless against the Ancient Ones themselves. He went on to add a little stone whistle to the curious things he had already bestowed upon me.
"In many ways, Mr. Colum, this whistle is your most potent weapon. When the time comes that you are in mortal danger, without other escape, if you will take a little of the mead, keep the star-stone in your possession, and blow this whistle, calling forth immediately thereafter these words—Id! Id! Hastur! Hastur tf'ayak 'vulgtumn, vugtlagln, vulgtmm! Ai! Ai! Hastur!—the Byakhee birds will come and transport you to a place of safety. . . . “
"If the minions of the Ancient Ones are everywhere, what haven is left?" I asked.
"There is one, where we can be safe. And yet we are not there; we are on Celaeno." He smiled tolerantly at my incredulous astonishment. "I do not blame you for thinking me deranged, Mr. Colum. I assure you most solemnly that what I say is the literal truth; Hastur and his minions are not subject to the same laws of time and space which bind us. Their summoning formula is heard, believe me, wherever you may be—and answered.”
He paused reflectively and studied my face. "Do you now wish to withdraw, Mr. Colum?”
I shook my head slowly, fascinated against all reason, against my will, against my judgement.
"Can you meet me at Southampton the day after tomorrow? Our ship is the Princess Ellen; we set out at nine in the morning."
"I'll be there," I said.
"A sum of money will be deposited to your account before I leave London, Mr. Colum. You will find it sufficient. Pray go on board the Princess Ellen even if I am not there; I will join you in good time, and do not be alarmed at my failure to appear, should the hour seem late. Reservations have been made." He hesitated. "And let me impress upon you once more the danger which attends you; believe me, it is never far from you—they know, since your book has come out, that you are dangerous to them or may become so.”
So saying, he took his departure, and I was left alone with the confusion of my thoughts and the conviction that I stood on the threshold of an adventure stranger than any ever conceived by the mind of man.
2
THE UTTER MONOTONY of the prosaic world of every day seldom impresses itself upon one until the establishment of a sharp contrast affords a comparative basis. There is, too, the very real danger that one may see and understand that the patina of the mundane which overlays all things is but a mask for the constant struggle which goes on unceasingly between recognizable forces of good and the nebulous, almost incredible evil which lies forever in wait just beyond the rim of awareness, lying in wait not only for the soul of man, but for the world itself, the world and possession of its lands and seas and, beyond that, of the star-spaces and all that lies in the cosmos.
I lay for a long time that night contemplating the things Professor Laban Shrewsbury had said to me, and the even more appalling things at which he had but hinted. The deep hours of night lend themselves well to the eerie, the enchanting, the terrible, but the core of reason, the solid substructure of all the practical knowledge which a man takes in for his first thirty years is not easily set aside by any fund of new and conflicting knowledge. My visitor had been, virtually, little more than a creature of the night; however persuasive his story, I knew nothing of him, though I held in my possession the curious things he had given me.
There were, however, certain avenues of information. My old friend, Henry Pilgore, possessed one of the most comprehensive of reference libraries. Despite the lateness of the hour, I telephoned him, putting in a trunk call to the Somerset village where he lived. He bade me to hang on while he sought out such information as he might have; but I did not have to wait long. Professor Shrewsbury was listed; Pilgore read his biographical sketch—of his home in Arkham, Massachusetts; of his one-time connection with Miskatonic University; of his erratic post-teaching existence; of his apparently wide travels; of his scholarly work, An Investigation into the Myth- Patterns of Latter-day Primitives with Especial Reference to the R'lyeh Text; and finally: "He disappeared in September, 1938. Presumed dead.”
Presumed dead. The words rang in my thoughts for a long moment. But I could not doubt that, whatever he might be, my visitor had most assuredly been Professor Laban Shrewsbury. What of the things he had left for me? The mead, he had said, had strange properties.
I opened the phial cautiously, touched a drop of it to my finger, and tasted it. It was flat to sweet, ambrosial on second taste, but it gave me no sensation at all, not even one akin to the mild stimulation of weak wine. Disappointed, I replaced the phial, and sat down once more in the darkness of my room. Far away, Big Ben struck two o'clock in the morning; I had but one more day in London, scarcely that, if I meant to be at Southampton docks by nine o'clock of the day following. But now doubts began to assail me; I began to doubt the wisdom of my decision; I began to consider my commitment folly—
And then I became aware of a subtle alteration in my sensory experience. I was slowly becoming cognizant of a greatly heightened perception on all planes; sounds common to the street outside were clearly heard and accurately interpreted; the smells, the odors and perfumes of the night infiltrating my quarters were made vastly stronger; but at the same time I experienced an even more significant quality of the mead of which I had partaken—my intuitive perception was increased beyond the bounds of what I might have considered possible, increased to such an extent that I became keenly aware of the hidden watchers posted not only in the building, but in the street, and even hundreds of yards away.
For they were there. I cannot say by what marvellous property of the mead I was enabled to see as clearly as if they stood before me the evilly batrachian and ichthyic features of those oddly repellant creatures in the guise of men; but see them I did. And I knew at that moment that everything my visitor had told me was true beyond question, no matter how fantastic his words had sounded. And this realization was fraught with the coldest and most soul-shaking terror, for the limitless vistas of ancient and potent horror, the alien concepts, the monstrous beings which were implicit in the hidden word of Professor Shrewsbury's revelation were paralyzing to mankind.
What happened then is incapable of any logical or scientific explanation.
I passed over into a sleeping state during which I had a most vivid dream, in which I saw myself packing my belongings for the impending voyage, writing a letter to my publisher to explain that I would be away from London for several months, instructing my brother by letter also to handle such affairs of mine as needed care during my absence, and finally slipping away from my quarters in a patent and successful effort to elude my followers. Furthermore, I made my way speedily to Waterloo Station, once I had complied with the formalities incidental to travelling abroad, and entrained for Southampton, where I presently found myself at the docks and on board the Princess Ellen, though not without a further frightening shock at the realization that, though I had eluded my London pursuers, I had other similar watchers following me in Southampton.
Now all this, I say, was a dream of the most vivid sort, wholly unlike any dream which I had ever previously experienced. It was so real, in fact, that it seemed to me that the figure in the chair was the dream, and the dream the reality. Or could both have been? I remembered later Professor Shrewsbury's comment about the strange properties of the golden mead, which was cerTHE tainly, I am now convinced, no invention of mans, properties never conceived by mankind but brought from some far place, even perhaps, from out of this world, from the hidden places in the cosmos where the Ancient Ones still lurk, waiting forever to return to the paradise from which they were cast out eons ago.
For I woke up not in my familiar Soho quarters, but in my cabin on board the Princess Ellen, with Professor Shrewsbury beside me. By what outre powers he possessed behind his formidable black spectacles, he divined the reason for my amazement.
"I see you have sampled the mead, Mr. Colum," he said quietly. He was not angry. "You will then have some appreciation of its properties.”
"It was not a dream then?”
He shook his head. "Whatever it was you dreamed was quite true. The mead enabled part of you to separate from its counterpart; you were thus empowered to see yourself doing what you must do in order to fulfil your commitment. Perhaps it was as well that you did try the mead; it gave you the means to understand how closely, indeed, you were being watched and followed, and it lent you furthermore the wit to elude your pursuers. But we shall not be long without pursuit, you may be sure of that.”
He waited until I had collected myself somewhat, adjusting to the situation in which I so surprisingly now found myself. Then he continued.
"We are bound for the port of Aden in Arabia, as I told you two nights ago. From Aden we will strike inward either toward the site of ancient Timna, which you may remember from Pliny, who referred to it as the 'city of forty temples'—of what nature, some of them, we may well wonder, or to the region around Salalah, the summer capital of the sultan of Muscat and Oman, in search of a fabulous subterranean city, a buried city, which has been designated as the 'Nameless City' by more than one authority. These are the areas once inhabited by the Hymarites, twenty to thirty centuries ago. In these vicinities we are likely to find the almost legendary Irem, the City of Pillars, which was seen by the Arab Abdul Alhazred, during his sojourn in the great southern desert, the Roba El Khaliyey or 'Empty Space' of the ancients, which is also the 'Dahna' or 'Crimson Desert' of the modern Arabs, and held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and deathdealing monsters. You will find it increasingly significant that we repeatedly encounter these so-called 'legends' of evil spirits and monsters, particularly since they are curiously corroborative of the central theses of the Cthulhu myth-pattern, wherever we go and in whatever directions we reach. You will ultimately conclude, even as I did long ago, that this is not coincidence.”
I assured him that I had already come to a surprisingly great degree of belief in the astonishing things he had striven to impart to me; manifestly, full belief depended upon such further examination as might be possible for me to make, though I had considerable apprehension as to what the future might hold in store for me.
He went on now to speak of the work of the Arab Abdul Alhazred, the book Al Azifi which had become the Necronomicon. None other had ever come so close to revealing the secrets of Cthulhu and the cults of Cthulhu, of Yog-Sothoth, and indeed, of all the Ancient Ones; the book, originally secretly circulated after Alhazreds mysterious disappearance and subsequent death in 731 A.D., hinted of things so terrible that the mind of man could scarcely conceive of them, and, conceiving, would instantly elect to reject them rather than adopt into the realm of the possible any potential event of such a nature as to refute many of the most fundamental principles by which the races of mankind exist, and relegate man to a position of even greater insignificance than his present mote-like place in the cosmos. The work, moreover, was of such a nature that all ecclesiastical authorities, regardless of affiliation, condemned it and had so successfully fought the spread by the most rigid suppression that only a very few copies of the Greek and Latin versions of the text were to be had, and these few copies were all under lock and key in various institutions—the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the library of the University of Buenos Aires, the Widener Library of Harvard, the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. The Arabic original was lost centuries ago, at about 1228, when Olaus Wormius made his Latin translation of the book.
Professor Shrewsbury had read the entire work in both the Latin and the Greek versions, and he hoped to discover somewhere in Arabia a copy of the Arabic, if not, indeed, the original manuscript, which, he held, had not disappeared but had rather remained in Alhazreds possession, a copy which had been used by Wormius having vanished instead. This was conjecture on the professor s part, but there were sound reasons for such a conclusion, and it began to dawn upon me that possession of this priceless manuscript was doubtless the immediate goal behind the expedition to Arabia. That there was something more lying in the back of Professor Shrewsbury's mind I could not doubt; and of this he was clearly unwilling to speak, for he gave no hint of its nature. Indeed, it was borne in upon me presently that, however open and above-board Professor Shrewsbury was, there was much left to be desired in his palimpsest of information regarding the Cthulhu Mythos and such adjunctive data as he chose to speak about. What he sought, he confidently expected to find either in Irem or the unidentified "Nameless City," which might be identical with cities at either the site of Timna or Salalah.
At this poi