BEING THE NARRATIVE OF HORVATH BLAYNE
1
THAT SOME RECORD of the events leading up to the so-called "top secret experiment" conducted at an uncharted South Pacific island on a September day in 1947 ought to be made, I have no question. That it would be wise is a moot point. There are some things against which the human race, which has in any event but a brief moment to remain on this planet to add to the brief moment of its previous existence, can be only inadequately forewarned and forearmed; and, this being so, it is conceivable that it would be better to remain silent and let one’s fellowmen wait upon events.
In final analysis, however, there are judges far better qualified than I, and the progression of events both before and since that "experiment" has been so disturbing and so suggestive of incredibly ancient evil almost beyond mans grasp that I am compelled to make this record before time dims these events—if ever it could—or before my own obliteration, which is inevitable, and may, indeed, be nearer than I think.
The episode began prosaically enough in the most famous bar in the world, in Singapore…..
I saw the five gentlemen sitting together when first I came into the bar and sat down. I was not far from them, and alone, and I looked at them casually, thinking that someone I knew might be among them. An elderly man with dark glasses and a strangely impressive countenance, and four young men, in late twenties or early thirties, intent upon some discussion conducted with considerable animation. I recognized no one; so I looked away. I had sat there perhaps ten minutes, perhaps a little less; Henry Caravel had come up and spoken to me in passing, and we had taken note of the time together; he had just gone when I heard my name spoken.
"Perhaps Mr. Blayne could enlighten us?”
The voice was cordial, well-modulated, with a peculiar carrying power. Looking up, I saw the five gentlemen at their table gazing toward me expectantly. At that instant, the old man stood.
"Our discussion is archaeological in a sense, Mr. Blayne," he said directly.
"If I may presume—I am Professor Laban Shrewsbury, a fellow
American. Will you join us?”
I thanked him and, moved by a lively curiosity, went over to his table.
He introduced his companions—Andrew Phelan, Abel Keane, Claiborne Boyd, and Nayland Colum—and turned once more to me.
"Of course, we all know Horvath Blayne. We have been following with keen interest your papers on Angkor-Vat and the Khmer civilization, and, with even more interest, your studies among the ruins of Ponape. It is no coincidence that we are at the moment discussing the pantheon of Polynesian deities. Tell us, in your opinion, does the Polynesian sea-god, Tangaroa, have the same origin as Neptune?”
"Probably Hindu or Indo-Chinese in origin," I guessed.
"Those people are not primarily seafarers," said the professor promptly.
"There is a concept older than those civilizations, even if we concede at once that the Polynesian civilization is much younger than those of the Asiatic continent which gave rise to them. No, we are not interested so much in their relation to other figures in the pantheon, as to the conceit which gave them being in the first place. And to its relation to so many batrachian or ichthyic figures and motifs which occur and recur in the art work, ancient and modern, to be found in the South Pacific islands.”
I protested that I was not primarily an artist, and certainly could not presume to be a critic of art.
The professor brushed this aside with courteous detachment. "But you are familiar with art. And I wonder whether you can explain why the primitives of the South Pacific should emphasize the batrachian or ichthyic in their artifacts and arts, while the primitives of the North Pacific, for example, emphasize characteristics which are clearly avian. There are exceptions, of course; you will recognize them. The lizard figures of Easter Island and the batrachian pieces from Melanesia and Micronesia are common to these areas; the avian masks and headdresses of the North Pacific Indian tribes are common to the Canadian coast. But we find on occasion among those coastal Indian tribes disturbingly familiar motifs; consider, for instance, the markedly batrachian aspects of the shamans headdress of the Haida tribe common to Prince of Wales Island and the ceremonial shark headdress of the Tlingit of Ketchikan, Alaska. The totems of the North Pacific Indians are primarily avian in concept, whereas such things as the ancestor figures carved into the tree-ferns of the New Hebrides quite clearly suggest aquatic dwellers.”
I remarked that ancestor-worship was common to the Asiatic continent.
But this was not his principal thesis, which I recognized in the expectance with which his companions attended to him. He came to it presently. Apropos the sea-deities of primitive peoples, had I ever encountered in my archaeological inquiries any of the legends pertaining to the mythological being, Cthulhu, whom he regarded as the progenitor of all seagods and the lesser deities connected with water as an element?
The comments he had made now fell into a distinct and well-knit pattern. Cthulhu, as the ancient god of water, the seas, a water elemental in a sense, must be considered as the primal deity of the South Pacific, while the avian motifs expressed in the artifacts and work of art common to the North Pacific derived from a worship of an air elemental rather than one of the sea. I was indeed familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos, with its remarkable lore in essence so familiar to the Christian Mythos of the expulsion of Sathanus and his followers and their ever-ceaseless attempts to re-conquer heaven.
The Mythos, as I recalled it while listening to the professor speak engagingly of Cthulhu, turned on a conflict between beings known as the Elder Gods, who presumably inhabited the cosmos many light-years away, and lesser beings called the Ancient Ones or the Great Old Ones, who were presumably the motive forces of evil as opposed to those representing good, who were the benevolent Elder Gods. All had apparently existed in harmony at one time, but then a revolt on the part of the Ancient Ones—who were Cthulhu, master of the waters; Hastur, who roamed the interplanetary spaces before his imprisonment in the dark Lake of Hali; Yog-Sothoth, most powerful of the Ancient Ones; Ithaqua, the god of the winds; Tsathoggua and Shub-Niggurath, gods of the earth and of fecundity; Nyarlathotep, their dread messenger; and others—resulted in their vanquishment and banishment to various places in the universe, from which they hoped to rise once more against the Elder Gods, and where they were served by their minions, cults of men and animals reared in their service. There were, additionally, pertaining to Cthulhu, supposedly inhabiting a secret place on earth, rather shockingly suggestive legends that certain of his batrachian followers, known as the Deep Ones, had mated with men and produced a horrible travesty of mankind known to be habitants of certain coastal Massachusetts towns.
Moreover, the Cthulhu Mythos had sprung from a collection of incredibly old manuscripts and similar sources purporting to be factual accounts, though nothing was adduced to prove them anything other than fiction of a highly skilled order; these manuscripts and books—the Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred; the Cubes des Goules, the work of an eccentric French nobleman, the Count d'Erlette; the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, a known aberrant who had roamed Europe and Asia in search of the remnants of old cults; the Celaeno Fragments; the R'lyeh Text; the Pnakotic Manuscripts; and the like—had been seized upon by writers of contemporary fiction and freely used as the source for incredible tales of fantasy and the macabre, and these had given a kind of aura of authenticity to what, at best, was a collection of lore and legends perhaps unique in the annals of mankind but surely little more.
"But you are skeptical, Mr. Blayne," observed the professor.
"I'm afraid I have the scientific mind," I answered.
"I rather think all of us here think similarly of ourselves," he said.
"Am I to understand that you believe in this volume of lore?"
He gazed at me disconcertingly from behind his dark spectacles. "Mr. Blayne, for more than three decades I have been on the trail of Cthulhu. Time after time I have believed that I have closed his avenues of ingress into our time; time after time I have been misled in thinking so.”
"Then if you believe one aspect of the pantheon, you must believe all the rest," I countered.
"That is not necessarily so," he replied. "But there are wide areas of belief. I have seen and I know.”
"I, too," said Phelan, and his supporting cry was echoed by the others. The truly scientific mind is as hesitant to deprecate as it is to lend support. "Let us begin with the primal struggle between the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones," I said cautiously. "What is the nature of your evidence?”
"The sources are almost infinite. Consider almost all the ancient writings which speak of a great catastrophe which involved the earth. Look to the Old Testament, to the battle of Beth-Horon, led by Joshua. And he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed. . . . " Look to the Annals of Cuauhtitlan of the lore of the Nahua Indians of Mexico, which speak of an endless night, a tale verified by the Spanish priest, Fr. Bernadino de Sahagun, who, coming to the New World a generation after Columbus, told of the great catastrophe in which the sun rose but a little way over the horizon and then stood still, a catastrophe witnessed by the American Indians. And the Bible again: As they fled from before Israel. . . the Lord cast down great stones upon them in Azekah, and they died. . . There are parallel accounts in other ancient manuscripts—the Popul Vuh of the Mayas, the Egyptian Papyrus Ipuwer} the Buddhist Visuddhi-Magga, the Persian Zend-Aversta, the Hindu Vedas, many another. There are curiously coincidental records left in ancient art—the Venus tablets of Babylon, found in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, certain of the panoplies at Angkor-Vat, which you must know—and there are the strangely altered clocks of ancient times—the water clock of the Temple of Amon at Karnak, now inaccurate for day and night; the shadow clock of Fayum, Egypt, inaccurate, too; the astronomical panel in the tomb of Senmut, in which the stars are shown in an order they do not have, but which may presumably have been correct for Senmut s time. And these stars, I submit, are not just accidentally those of the Orion-Taurus group, held to be the seat of both the Elder Gods—who are believed to exist at or near Betelgeuse—and at least one of the Ancient Ones, Hastur; and were presumably home to all the Ancient Ones. So that the catastrophe duly recorded in the old documents may very well have been evidence of the titanic battle which was waged between the Elder Gods and the rebellious Ancient Ones.”
I pointed out that there was a current theory concerning erratic conduct on the part of the planet now called Venus.
Professor Shrewsbury shrugged this away almost with impatience. "Entertaining, but pure nonsense. The concept of Venus as a one-time comet can be disproved scientifically; the concept of the conflict between the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones cannot. I submit, Mr. Blayne, that your actual conviction of disbelief is not as strong as your words.”
In this he was eminently correct. What this strange old man had said had aroused and awakened a thousand latent memories, all of which now coalesced in the events of the moment. An archaeologist cannot have seen the weird grotesques of Easter Island without a sense of an impending past; he cannot have looked upon Angkor-Vat or the shunned ruins of certain of the Marquesas Islands without a dim awareness of the terror that lurked in ancient places; he cannot have studied the legends of ancient peoples without recognizing that the lore of mankind, however exaggerated, takes root in some remote reality. Moreover, there was about my newly-found companions an air of gravity which was plain behind their good-nature, and was almost sinister without being malevolent. I could not doubt that these gentlemen were deadly serious, for each of them testified mutely that he had been on this quest for more than just a short time.
"You see," continued Professor Shrewsbury, "it would be folly to pretend that this meeting was an accident. Your movements had been studied enough to make it occur. It is just possible that in your studies of ancient ruins and the drawings, hieroglyphics, and other remains found among them, you may have happened upon something which might afford us a clue to the place we seek.”
"And what is that?" I asked.
"An island." So saying, he unfolded before me a crudely-drawn map.
I examined the map with interest which was quickened appreciably when it dawned upon me that this was no ordinary map done by the hand of an ill-informed person, but rather a map drawn by someone who clearly believed in the objects he drew; that these objects were not placed as he had placed them suggested an artist of centuries ago.
"Java and Borneo/' I said, identifying them. "These islands are apparently the Carolines and the marked place is northward. But the directions are not very clear.”
"Yes, that is its drawback," agreed Professor Shrewsbury dryly.
I looked at him sharply. "Where did you get this, Professor?”
"From a very old man.”
"He must have been very old indeed," I agreed.
"Almost fifteen centuries," he answered, without a smile. "But, come, do you recognize this place beyond the Carolines?”
I shook my head.
"Then we fall back upon your own research, Mr. Blayne. You have been in the South Pacific ever since the end of the Second World War. You have gone from island to island, and you will have seen certainly that in some areas there is a marked emphasis on the batrachian motif, or the ichthyic motif— it matters little, save that we have reason to believe one island at least to be either the focal point or near the focal point of the occurrence of artifacts and works of art stressing the batrachian.”
"Ponape," I said.
He nodded, and the others waited expectantly.
"You see," he went on, "I have been to the Black Island, which has no name and is uncharted because it is not always visible and rises to the surface only at rare intervals. But my means of travel was somewhat unorthodox, my attempt to blast the island and its horrible ruins was ineffective; we must find it again, and we shall find it most readily by picking up the trail of the batrachian motif in Polynesian art.”
"There are certain legends," I put in, "which speak of a vanishing land. It would presumably be stationary?”
"Yes, making its appearance only when upheavals of the oceans bed thrust it up. And then evidently not for long. I need not remind you that there have been recent tremors recorded by seismographs for the region of the South Pacific; conditions are thus ideal for our quest. We are at liberty to suppose it to be part of a larger, submerged land area, quite possibly one of the legendary continents.”
"Mu," said Phelan.
"If Mu existed/' countered the professor gravely.
"There is ample evidence to believe it did/' I said, "together with Atlantis. If you were to fall back upon your own kind of evidence, there is plenty of legendry to give the belief body—the Bible's story of the Deluge, for instance; the ancient books' accounts of catastrophes, the submerging of vast land areas depicted in the drawings found at the sites of so much archaeological discovery."
One of the professor's companions grinned and said, "You're entering into the spirit of it, Mr. Blayne.”
The professor, however, gazed at me without smiling. "You believe in the existence of Mu, Mr. Blayne?”
"I'm afraid I do.”
"And presumably also in the ancient civilizations said to have inhabited Mu and Atlantis," he went on. "There are certain legends attributable to some such lost civilizations, Mr. Blayne—particularly in relation to their sea deities—and there are survivals of ancient worship in the Balearics, in the islands of the Carolines, at Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and in a few other widely separated areas. If Atlantis lay off the coast of Spain, and Mu near the Marshalls, presumably there might have been yet another land area at one time lying off the coast of Massachusetts. And the Black Island might be part of yet another land area; we cannot know. But it is certain that the Bible's Deluge and other similar legendary catastrophes might well have been evidence of the titanic struggle which resulted in the banishment of Cthulhu to one of the lost continents of this planet.”
I nodded, aware for what seemed the first time of the intense scrutiny of the others.
"The Black Island is thus far the only known avenue directly to Cthulhu; all others are primarily in the possession of the Deep Ones. We must therefore search for it by every means at our disposal.”
It was at this point of our conversation that I became aware of a subtle force vying with my interest, which was far keener than I had permitted myself to show; it was a blind feeling of hostility, an awareness, as it were, of something malign in the very atmosphere. I looked from one to another of them, but there was nothing in their eyes save only an interest similar to my own. Yet the aura of fear, of enmity, was unmistakable, perhaps made all the more so by its very tenuousness. I looked past my companions, allowing my glance to travel along the bar, among the tables; I saw no one who was even aware of us, though the bar, as always, was crowded with people of all nationalities in all walks of life. The conviction of hostility, the aura of fear persisted, lying against my consciousness as were it a tangible thing.
I gave my attention again to Professor Shrewsbury. He talked now of the trail of Cthulhu through the arts and crafts of primitive peoples, and his words conjured up from my own memories a thousand corroborating details— of the curious figures found in the Sepik River valley of New Guinea; of the Tapa cloth designs of the Tonga islanders; of the hideously suggestive Fisherman's God of the Cook Islanders, with its misshapen torso and its substitution of tentacles for legs and arms; of the stone tiki of the Marquesas, markedly batrachian in aspect; of the carvings of the New Zealand Maori, which depict creatures neither man nor octopus, neither fish nor frog, but something of all four; of the revolting war-shield design used by Queenslanders, a design of a labyrinth under water with a tortuously malefic figure at the end of it, tentacles extended as if for prey; and the similar shell pendants of the Papuans; of the ceremonial music of the Indonesias, particularly the Batak dream music, and the Wayang shadow-play of leather puppets on ancient themes dramatizing a legend of sea-beings. All these pointed unmistakably to Ponape from one direction, while the ceremonial figures used in some parts of the Hawaiian Islands and the great heads of Rano-raraku on Easter Island made a similar indication from the other.
Ponape, with its shunned ruins, its abandoned port in which the carvings are of unmistakable significance, carvings of brooding terror, of fishmen, of frog-men, of octopoids, all speaking mutely of a strange and terrible way of life led by inhabitants who were half-bestial, half-human. And from Ponape, where?
"You are thinking of Ponape," said Professor Shrewsbury quietly.
"Yes—and of what might lie beyond. If the Black Island is not between Ponape and Singapore, it must lie between that island and Easter Island.”
"The only direction we have is that of the Johansen narrative, discovered in Lovecraft, and subsequently repeated in the story of the disappearance of the H.M.S. Advocate. S. Latitude 470 53', W. Longitude 1270 37'. That would be in the general area. But the latitude and longitude may not be correct; according to the Greenbie account, that is the place at which the Advocate ran into a storm 'blowing something terrible/ There is thus a possibility of some error, since we have no way of knowing how far off course the ship may have been blown, nor how long a time elapsed since Greenbie last ascertained longitude and latitude. He makes note that they were steering 'a course straight for the Admiralties or New Guinea . . . but we saw by the stars that we were off course by west.”
"The Johansen narrative.…
I interrupted him. "Forgive me, I am not familiar with these accounts.”
"My apologies. Of course, you could not be. They are not vital to your
knowledge, but exist only as curiously corroborative statements. Or rather,
as statements which are extremely suggestive in the light of what we know. If
one has no belief in Cthulhu and the pantheon of Elder Gods and Ancient
Ones, such accounts are meaningless, and all too readily dismissed as hysteria;
if one keeps an open mind, however, such accounts become damnably
suggestive. One cannot dismiss them.”
"These accounts apart, and all else, too," I said, "what do you expect of me?"
"I submit that you are perhaps more qualified to speak with authority on the arts and artifacts of the South Pacific than anyone else within the entire region. We are satisfied that the primitive drawings and sculptures of these people will point unmistakably to the approximate location of the Black Island. Specifically, we are interested in the occurrence of any work similar to the Fisherman's God of Cook Island, which, we have reason to believe, is a representation, as seen by the primitive mind, of Cthulhu himself. By narrowing the circle of its incidence, it is logical to suppose that we can box in the site of the island.”
I nodded thoughtfully, certain that I could almost effortlessly construct the ring that Professor Shrewsbury visualized.
"Can we count on you, Mr. Blayne?”
"More than that. If you have room for me, I'll join your party.”
Professor Shrewsbury favored me with a long silent glance which I found somewhat disconcerting, but at last he said, "We have a place for you, Mr. Blayne. We hope to leave Singapore in two days." He gave me his card, writing rapidly on the back of it. "You will find me at this address if you need me.”
2
I TOOK MY LE A V E O F Professor Shrewsbury's party with curious misgivings. My offer to accompany them had been made almost involuntarily; I had had no intention of doing more than the professor had asked, but some impulse stronger than my own wish had impelled me instead to propose that I go with them to seek their goal. Once outside the bar, I asked myself why I had not doubted the professor's strange story; the evidence he had offered was purely circumstantial, and I could not have said that I had in fact ever come upon anything more to justify belief; and yet I found myself believing readily not only in the existence of the Black Island, but also in the vast mythology so sketchily outlined for me, in all that pantheon of Elder Gods and Ancient Ones of which that oddly persuasive and yet curiously repellant old man in the black glasses had spoken. Moreover, I recognized that my belief stemmed from something more than Professor Shrewsbury's words; it arose from a deep inner conviction, as if I had known all this long before but had either refused to acknowledge it or had failed to become aware of it because the proper opportunity for recognition had never arisen.
And yet I had always been strangely stirred at sight of just such art as Professor Shrewsbury had hinted at, and most of all, at the Cook Islanders' horribly suggestive Fisherman's God. What Professor Shrewsbury had plainly intimated was that this work had had a living model; and of this I, despite my archaeological training, had never entertained the shadow of a doubt. I could ask myself now to discover the reasons for my belief in the face of the previous record of dubiety I had established in my field; I could not answer, save to point to an inner conviction far stronger than any amount of cold rationalization. For it could not be denied that Professor Shrewsbury's analysis was not in itself factual, that the explanation for the various events and the nature of the evidence he projected were alike hypothetical in the extreme, that other solutions presented themselves as well, for the annals of primitive peoples are replete with many weird symbols and customs utterly unrelated to the living-patterns of contemporary man. But no challenge caused any wavering in my conviction. I knew, as if I had been there, that there was indeed an uncharted island near Ponape, that it was part of a sunken kingdom which might indeed have been R'lyeh and part of Mu, that it was the source of an incredible power, and no rationalization could explain either my conviction or my complete refusal to consider any other explanation of the tentative outline Professor Shrewsbury had offered. He, too, knew; the facts he had adduced were but the tiniest fraction of the adducible evidence.
And what impulse was it that sent me into the shadows to wait upon the emergence of Professor Shrewsbury and his companions? I could not say; yet I remained in a place of concealment until the five men left the bar, watching them come out. I had no impulse to follow, but I knew as by intuition that they would not be unattended, and they were not. Their followers walked at a respectable distance behind them—one, a second, yet another, at widely separated intervals.
I stepped out and faced one of them. He met my eyes questioningly for a moment, held my gaze, and looked away. A lascar, I judged him, but oddly deformed, with a curiously suggestive head, foreshortened, with little brow, and repellantly wide-mouthed, with scarcely a chin at all, but a sloping fold of skin that vanished into his neck. And his skin, too, was rough, warty. I felt no horror, looking at him. Perhaps Professor Shrewsbury's hints had prepared me for such an apparition, for I had known someone would be there. I was equally certain, however, that, for the present at least, my newly-found friends were in no danger.
I took myself off to my quarters presently, very thoughtful and preoccupied, for there was manifestly something more than Professor Shrewsbury's story and the quest of the five for the mythological Cthulhu to stir me. Once at my rooms, I found myself drawn to the packet of papers which had come down to me from my grandfather Waite—for my name had not always been Blayne, having undergone a change in the home of my foster-parents in Boston—my grandfather Asaph Waite, whom I had never consciously seen, and who perished with my grandmother, my father, and my mother in a disaster which had struck their town when I was yet only a babe in arms, and while I was on a visit with cousins in Boston who had forthwith adopted me after a loss which, to any other older child, would have been shockingly tragic.
My grandfather's papers were wrapped in oilskin—he had been a seafaring man out of Massachusetts, at one time an agent of the famous Marsh family, which for generations had been seafaring men, ranging far and wide over the face of the earth—and I had had them with me for years. I had examined the small packet from time to time, with curious stirrings and misgivings; tonight something Professor Shrewsbury had said had brought the papers back into my memory, and I wanted to look at them once more, without delay.
They consisted of fragments of an old diary—some pages had been torn out here and there; of fragmentary letters; a few documents, and some of what purported to be my grandfathers own writings entitled simply: Invocations, though down in one corner someone had added: to Dagon. The Invocations came to hand first. These were evidently intended as at least semi-poetry, and were written in a manner at times coherent, at others apparently incoherent—unless, as I was now prepared to admit, I lacked the proper key to understanding. I read but one of them, with considerably more care, however, than I had previously given it.
"By all the depths of Y'ha-nthlei—and the dwellers thereof, for the One Over All;
"B