Tales from the Cthulhu Universe

By Christopher Broschell

Twenty-five short stories from H.P. Lovecraft's legendary Cthulhu realm, including tales by the master himself as well as Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, and Conan creator Robert E. Howard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Broschell
• Release date: Sep 10, 2021

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Tales from the Cthulhu Universe

Copyright ©2021 by Christopher Broschell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced of transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

The Nameless City

The Trail of Cthulhu

The Thing on the Roof

The Space-Eaters

The Shambler from the Stars

The Return of the Sorcerer

The Hound

I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket ...

The Man of Stone

The Invaders

The Terrible Parchment

The Challenge from Beyond

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

The Disinterment

The Fire Vampires

The Necronomicon

The Shadow from the Steeple

The Ghost-Eater

The Isle of Dark Magic

The Abyss

The Fire of Asshurbanipal

Something from Out There

The Eater of Souls

Philtre Tip

The Dreams in the Witch-House

The Nameless City

H. P. Lovecraft

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse might protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange eons, even death may die.

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man; yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.

For hours I waited, till the east grew gray and the stars faded, and the gray turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones, though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of the desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disk as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal stone place; that place too old for Egypt and Meroe to remember; that place which I alone of living men had seen.

In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and palaces I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the gray stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.

I awoke just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and the bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the splendors of an age so distant that Chaldea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of gray stone before mankind existed.

All at once I came upon a place where the bedrock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples, whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long since effaced any carvings which may have been outside.

Very low and sand-choked were all of the dark apertures near me, but I cleared one with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures nor frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting, and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the other temples might yield.

Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long moon-cast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained. The room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptic shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and of my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.

The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me almost out of sight. Against the choking sand cloud I plodded toward this temple, which, as I neared it, loomed larger than the rest, and showed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.

This temple, as I had imagined from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I saw for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.

Then a bright flare of the fantastic flame showed me that for which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warnings of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the lands that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.

It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long, low level passage where I had to wriggle feet first along the rocky floor, holding the torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.

In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of demoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascus, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated bizarre extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the demons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales — the unreverberate blackness of the abyss. Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in singsong from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:

A reservoir of darkness, black

As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd

With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd.

Leaning to look if foot might pass

Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,

As far as vision could explore,

The jetty sides as smooth as glass,

Looking as if just varnish'd o'er

With that dark pitch the Sea of Death

Throws out upon its slimy shore.

Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Paleozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly fastened.

I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.

Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of the corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realized that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and colors were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.

To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the paleontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their forelegs bore delicate and evidently flexible feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared — in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead; yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed the things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some Paleogene species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.

The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, because they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.

Holding this view, I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterward its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvelous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.

As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic — the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.

Still nearer the end of the passage were painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance; contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley were shown always by moonlight, a golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls and half revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys.

At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skilful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people — always represented by the sacred reptiles — appeared to be gradually wasting away, though their spirits as shown hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene showed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the older race. I remembered how the Arabs fear the nameless city and was glad that beyond this place the gray walls and ceiling were bare.

As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely the end of the low-ceiled hall and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such as one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.

Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps — small, numerous steps like those of the black passages I had traversed — but after a few feet the glowing vapors concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the steps, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.

As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance — scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shown in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honored, though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved a crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passage in the awesome descent should be as low as the temples — or lower since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of primordial life.

But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.

My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes showed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outline. Of what could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent, deserted vigil.

Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound — the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till soon it reverberated frightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draft of cold air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above.

The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, because I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so braced myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.

More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into that gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination.

The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible notions; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent.

I think I screamed frantically near the last — I was almost mad — but if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babble of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange eons even death may die.

Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place — what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion — or worse — claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing — too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.

I have said the fury of the rushing blast was infernal — caco-demoniacal — and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered eon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous ether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor — a nightmare horde of rushing devils ; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent devils of a race no man might mistake — the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.

And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-peopled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.

The Trail of Cthulhu

August Derleth

(The controversial Phelan Manuscript, found in the room from which Andrew Phelan so strangely vanished during the night of September 1, 1938, has at last been conditionally released for publication by the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham, Massachusetts, which had requested it from the Boston police files. It is reproduced here by express permission of Dr. Llanfer of the library staff, with the exception only of certain deletions whose' suggestiveness was too terrible, and whose concepts too alien to contemporary mankind to permit of publication.)

Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralyzing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.— H. P. Lovecraft.

It would not be in error to maintain that my recent experiences were a direct outgrowth of the advertisement in the Personals column of The Saturday Review, for the advertisement was unusual and provocative. I saw it first on a day when I was not certain from what source my next week’s board and lodging were coming; it was unpretentious, but there was in it a curious note of challenge which I found it difficult to ignore. I read down the column and came back to it.

Young man of brawn, brain and limited imagination. If with modicum of secretarial ability, apply to 93 Curwen Street, Arkham, Mass., for information which may be of monetary advantage.

Arkham was only a few hours from Boston—an old city whose clustering gambrel roofs had once concealed hunted witches, whose changelessness lent itself to strange tales of haunts and legends, whose narrow streets along the Miskatonic River were sentient with the very presence of past centuries, of people who had lived there and had been dust for long decades—and it was pleasant to find myself once more within its boundaries early that June evening. I had philosophically packed all such worldly goods as I felt might be necessary to keep me in the position—if I suited the advertiser—until I myself knew that I could fill it to my own satisfaction; and I carried them in one stout suitcase, which I checked at the bus station immediately on my arrival there. After a light repast, I sought out a city directory and ascertained the identity of the inhabitant of 93 Curwen Street, whose name was given as Dr. Laban Shrewsbury.

Acting on the intuitive convection that Dr. Shrewsbury might be a person of some consequence, I took myself to the reference rooms of Miskatonic University and made inquiry, as a result of which I was directed not only to a local file on him, but also to a book he had written and published two years ago. The file was informative to an exceptional degree; I learned that Dr. Shrewsbury was a student of mysticism, a lecturer in occult sciences, a teacher of philosophy, an authority on myth and religious patterns of ancient peoples. His book, I am ashamed to confess, was far less informative; it was in large part beyond me. It bore the forbidding title of An Investigation into the Myth-Patterns of Latter-day Primitives with Especial Reference to the R’lyeh Text, and the merely cursory glances which I was able to give it conveyed nothing whatever to me, save the. fact that my prospective employer was engaged upon some kind of research which ought, if not precisely within my sphere, to be at least not uncongenial to me. Armed with this information, I set out for Curwen Street.

The house I sought differed little from other houses on its street; indeed, it had so

similar, an aspect that it might have been one of a row all designed by the same unimaginative architect and constructed by the same builders. It was large without giving the appearance of largeness; its windows were casement windows, and small; its many gables receded into roofs that seemed to sway and sag; and it was weather stained without having the appearance of being in sore need of paint. Moreover, it was set between gnarled trees, both of an indeterminate age, but seemingly quite ancient, older in fact than the house, which had about it an aura of age that was almost tangible. At this time of the day — the hour was that last hour of dusk, when the deeper twilight invade country lanes and city streets like a kind of just-perceptible smoke —the house had an almost sinister appearance, but this I knew to be the inevitable effect of the ever-changing light.

There was no glow from any of the windows, and I stood briefly on the stoop wondering whether I might have chosen an inopportune time to call on my prospective employer. But I had not, for even as I raised my hand to knock, the door swung open, and I found myself facing an elderly man who wore his hair long and white, but had neither mustache nor beard, thus revealing a firm, almost prognathous chin, half-pursed lips, and a strong Roman nose. His eyes were not visible at all, for he wore dark glasses with shields which prevented one from seeing his eyes even from the side.

Dr. Shrewsbury?

Yes. What can I do for you?

"My name is Andrew Phelan. I came in answer to your advertisement in The Saturday Review."

Ah. Come in. You’re just in time.

I did not attach any significance to this cryptic statement, other than to assume that he had been expecting someone else—as indeed he had, for so he soon informed me —and wished only to say that I came in good time for an interview, before his expected visitor turned up. I followed him into a dimly-lit hall, so feebly illumined that I had to go cautiously in case I stumble, and presently found myself in the old man’s study, a high-ceiled room which contained many books, not only on shelves, but strewn all over on floor, chairs, and the old man’s desk. The professor waved me to a chair and himself sat down at his desk. He began immediately to ply me with questions.

Could I read Latin and French? Yes, I could read both languages with some facility. Could I box and did I know jujitsu? Happily, I had some knowledge of both. He seemed particularly concerned about my imagination, and repeatedly asked curious questions which seemed designed to reveal to him whether I could be easily frightened, never once asking me directly. He explained that he had occasion to pursue his studies in strange, out-of-the-way places, and was often put in some personal danger from roughs and thugs, and for that purpose he required a secretary-companion who would act as a bodyguard should the necessity—admittedly remote—arise. Could I transcribe conversation? I believed I could do so reasonably well. He hoped I was familiar with certain dialects and seemed gratified when I revealed that I had studied philology at Harvard.

You may wonder, he said then, at my insistence about lack of imagination, but my research and experiments are of so outré a character that a too-imaginative companion might well be able to grasp enough of the fundamentals to suspect the cosmic revelations which might come of my work. Candidly, I must take precautions to prevent anything of that nature from happening.

I had been aware for some time of something vaguely disquieting about Dr. Shrewsbury; I could not ascertain what it was, nor what basis it had in my awareness. Perhaps it was that I could obtain no glimpse of his eyes; certainly it was disconcerting to be faced by these opaque black glasses which gave no hint of sight; but it did not seem to be that; it seemed rather to be something that was almost psychic and, had I been given to an easy submission to intuition and instinct, I would have withdrawn. For there was something markedly strange here; I needed no imagination to sense it, for there was an aura of fear and awe about the room in which I sat, oddly incongruous with the musty smell of books and old papers, and there was above all an insistent and absurd impression of being in a place apart and away from all other human habitation, like a house of dread in a remote forest, or a place of insecurity in a borderland between darkness and daylight instead of a prosaic old dwelling along one of the river streets in ancient Arkham.

As if he sensed this incipient doubt lodged in my mind, my prospective employer delivered himself of some reassurance in the disarming way in which he spoke of his work, seeming to ally us against the predatorily curious world which inevitably imposes upon scholars and savants, and casts over all their work and thought the insidious rust of doubt and disparagement. It was because of this, he said, that he preferred to work with someone like myself, who came to him free of any prejudice and would shortly be protected against prejudice.

Many of us search in strange places for strange things, he said, and there are aspects of existence about which even the great of our time have not yet dared to speculate. Einstein and Schrodinger have come close among the scientists; the late writer, Lovecraft, came even closer. He shrugged. But now, to business.

Forthwith he made me an offer of remuneration so tempting that it would have been folly even to hesitate about its acceptance; and I did not. At once upon my acceptance, he gravely cautioned me to speak to no one of anything that might actually happen or seem to happen in this house — For things are not always as they seem, he explained enigmatically — and to know no fear within myself, even if no explanation of events was immediately forthcoming.

He would expect me to occupy a room in the house; moreover, he would greatly like to have me begin work at once, as soon as my bag had been got from its place of storage — and this could be sent for —because he wished as much as possible of the conversation with his expected visitor transcribed. The transcription must be made from the adjoining room, or from place of concealment, since it was doubtful if his visitor would speak if he suspected the presence of anyone other than his host, who had had the greatest difficulty in persuading him to come up from the port of Innsmouth and pay him this visit.

Giving me no opportunity to ask questions, but placing at my disposal pencils and paper, and showing me where I must conceal myself—behind an ingeniously contrived peephole at one of the bookcases—the professor took me upstairs to a small, cramped gable room which was to be mine for the duration of my association with. him. It was flattering, I vaguely felt, to have been graduated from a mere secretary-companion to an associate, but I had little time in which to ponder this, for I had hardly returned to the floor below, when the professor observed that his visitor must be near. Hardly had he spoken, when the heavy door resounded to the thud of the knocker and the professor, motioning me to my place of concealment, went to open it and admit his nocturnal visitor.

When my employer first mentioned his coming visitor, I had naturally assumed that it would be someone engaged in similar research; therefore I was utterly unprepared for the sight of the professor’s guest that I had from my peephole; for he was by no means the kind of individual I would have expected to see in Dr. Shrewsbury’s house. He was a man still on the sunny side of middle age, but this fact was not immediately apparent, since he was swarthy – so swarthy that I took him for a lascar, and it was not until he began to speak that I identified him as of South American origin. He was clearly a sailor, for his garb was nautical, and it was obvious that this was not his first visit with the professor, though equally clear that it was his first call at the house on Curwen Street.

There was a colloquy in tones too low for my hearing, but this was evidently not meant for me, since it was not until the two of them were seated in the professor’s study that Dr. Shrewsbury raised his voice to normal volume, and his visitor did likewise. The conversation I then transcribed was as follows:

I wish you would tell me from the beginning, Senor Fernandez what took place , last summer.

(Apparently disregarding this suggestion, the sailor broke into his narrative in a curious but not illiterate mixture of Spanish and English at a point where he must have dropped it earlier.) It was night, very black. I was separated from the party, and all the time I walk, walk, I do not know where ...

You were somewhere in the vicinity of Machu Picchu, according to your map?

Si. But I do not know where, and afterward you know, we could not find the place or even the way I took. But then, it rained. There I was walking in the rain, and then I thought I heard music. It was strange music. It was like Indian music. You know, the old Incas lived there, and they had ...

Yes, yes. I know those things. I know about the Incas. I want to know what you saw, Senor Fernandez.

I walk all the time, I don’t know in what directions or anything, but it seemed to me the music was getting louder, and then one time I thought it was just in front of me, but when I walk that way, I come to a bluff. I could feel it was solid stone. I walk around a little way, feeling along it. Then the lightning flashed, and I saw it was a high hill. Then it happened. I don’t know how to say it. Suddenly the hill did not seem to be there, or perhaps I was somewhere else, but I swear I had drunk nothing, I was not delirious, I was not ill. I fell down something, and I was in a doorway—it was rocks that had the shape of a doorway, and there was black water down there, and Indians half-dressed, you know the way they used to dress in the old days of the Conquistadores, and there was something in that lake. That was where the music was coming from.

The lake?

Si, Senor. From inside the water and from the outside too. There was music of two kinds. One kind was like opium, it was so sweet and intoxicating; the other was by the Indians—it was wild, pipe-music, it was not good to hear.

Can you describe what you saw in the lake?

It was big. (Here he paused, his brow furrowed.) It was so big I do not know how to say it. It seemed to be as big as a hill, but of course, .that cannot be. It was like jelly. All tire time it changed its shape. Sometimes it was tall. Sometimes it was squat and fat with tentacles. It made a kind of whistling or gurgling sound. I do not know what the Indians were doing with it.

Were they worshipping it?

Si, si. That could be it. (He seemed excited.) But I do not know what it was.

Have you ever gone back there?

No, I thought I was followed that time. Sometimes I think so still. We looked next day. Somehow I found my way back to the camp in the night, but we could find nothing.

When you say you thought you were followed, do you know by what?

It was by one of the Indians. (He shook his head thoughtfully.) It was like a shadow. I don’t know. Maybe not.

When you saw those Indians, did you hear anything?

Si, but I could not understand. It was not in any language I knew, only in part of their own language. But there was one word, perhaps a name ...

Yes? Go on, please.

"Shooloo."

"Cthulhu!"

Si, si.’’ (He nodded vigorously.) But for the rest—it was just shouting and screaming, I do not know what it was they said."

And the thing you saw in the lake—was it anything like the Devourer, the war-god of the Quichuas? I take it you have seen the Chavin Stone?

Our party examined it many times before we went into the Inca country. It is in the National Museum at Lima. We went from there to Abancay, and into the Andes for Cuzco, then into the Cordillera de Vilcanota to Ollantaytambo. Then to Machu Picchu.

If you examined it, you will have noticed that the diorite slab depicts serpents issuing from various parts of Huitzilopochtli’s body. Now in regard to the jelly-like mass you saw in the subterranean lake, did it not also have appendages on its body?

Not serpents, Senor.

But it had appendages? That is the point I wish to make.

Si!

"Were you in the vicinity of the