The Other Gods and More Unearthly Tales (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By H. P. Lovecraft and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Collected in this volume are spine-tingling tales showing us that below the ground and at the top of mountain peaks lurk nameless gods and ghouls, powerful and horrific.  In cemeteries and desert wastes and swampy bogs, the evidence of past civilizations remains waiting to be uncovered, ominously portending mankind’s own inglorious future conclusion.  Even more disconcerting in H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional world is that one need not even leave home to come face-to-face with the cataclysmic revelation of man’s insignificance.  Monsters not only skulk in underground crypts and exotic foreign lands, but swarm all around us, just out of sight.

Among the creepy tales included in this volume are “He,” “The Moon-Bog,” “The Other Gods,” “Polaris.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411438255

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of science fiction and horror stories. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to a wealthy family, he suffered the loss of his father at a young age. Raised with his mother’s family, he was doted upon throughout his youth and found a paternal figure in his grandfather Whipple, who encouraged his literary interests. He began writing stories and poems inspired by the classics and by Whipple’s spirited retellings of Gothic tales of terror. In 1902, he began publishing a periodical on astronomy, a source of intellectual fascination for the young Lovecraft. Over the next several years, he would suffer from a series of illnesses that made it nearly impossible to attend school. Exacerbated by the decline of his family’s financial stability, this decade would prove formative to Lovecraft’s worldview and writing style, both of which depict humanity as cosmologically insignificant. Supported by his mother Susie in his attempts to study organic chemistry, Lovecraft eventually devoted himself to writing poems and stories for such pulp and weird-fiction magazines as Argosy, where he gained a cult following of readers. Early stories of note include “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Tomb” (1917), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). “The Call of Cthulu,” originally published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is considered by many scholars and fellow writers to be his finest, most complex work of fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft became one of the century’s leading horror writers whose influence remains essential to the genre.

Book preview

THE OTHER GODS AND MORE UNEARTHLY TALES

THE OTHER GODS AND MORE UNEARTHLY TALES

H. P. LOVECRAFT

Introduction by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Introduction and Suggested Reading

© 2010 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-3825-5

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE TOMB

POLARIS

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

THE TRANSITION OF JUAN ROMERO

THE WHITE SHIP

THE STREET

THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH

THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER

THE TREE

THE TEMPLE

CELEPHAÏS

FROM BEYOND

EX OBLIVIONE

THE NAMELESS CITY

THE MOON-BOG

THE OTHER GODS

HYPNOS

WHAT THE MOON BRINGS

AZATHOTH

THE HOUND

THE LURKING FEAR

THE UNNAMABLE

THE FESTIVAL

UNDER THE PYRAMIDS

THE SHUNNED HOUSE

THE HORROR AT RED HOOK

HE

IN THE VAULT

THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE IN THE MIST

THE DESCENDANT

HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON

THE VERY OLD FOLK

THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY

THE EVIL CLERGYMAN

THE BOOK

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

INTRODUCTION

ALL OF US, INSISTS THE FICTION OF H. P. LOVECRAFT, ARE LIKE CHILDREN lost in the woods at night with only a flashlight to illuminate our way. We think we are safe and know where we are going, but lurking just beyond the perimeter of the flashlight’s weak glow are horrors beyond description—monsters and gods, demons and ghosts. We think we know where we are going, but we are lost in the woods, the monsters are hungry . . . and our flashlight is dying. This is H. P. Lovecraft’s signature achievement—his creation of cosmic horror, stories describing a universe full of ominous powers and forces lurking just out of sight with the capacity to wipe out humanity. Collected in this volume are spine-tingling tales showing us that below the ground and at the top of mountain peaks lurk nameless gods and ghouls, powerful and horrific. In cemeteries and desert wastes and swampy bogs, the evidence of past civilizations remains waiting to be uncovered, ominously portending mankind’s own inglorious future conclusion. Even more disconcerting in Lovecraft’s fictional world is that one need not even leave home to come face-to-face with the cataclysmic revelation of man’s insignificance. Monsters not only skulk in underground crypts and exotic foreign lands, but swarm all around us, just out of sight. Ignorance, insists Lovecraft in his fiction, is ultimately bliss because true knowledge of humanity’s precariousness and inconsequentiality in the larger scheme of things is too horrific for the mind to comprehend unscathed. To realize just what lurks beyond the flashlight’s weak glow is to go mad—as so many of Lovecraft’s narrators ultimately do.

Like his narrators, Lovecraft’s own life was not untouched by mental instability, depression, and insanity. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the final descendent of an old New England family, was born on August 20, 1890, at the family home in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, could trace her family tree back to the seventeenth century, while his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, could trace his back even further to the Middle Ages in England. In 1893, Lovecraft’s father, a traveling salesman plagued by what Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi refers to as a sexual obsession related to his wife being raped, suffered a psychological breakdown while on the road in Chicago and had to be confined to Butler Hospital in Providence (an insane asylum) where he suffered from paranoia, dementia, and delusions of grandeur before dying five years later of what was most likely tertiary syphilis.¹ Lovecraft’s mother, traumatized by her husband’s condition, grew increasingly mentally unstable and suffered a psychological breakdown herself in 1919. In 1921 she passed away due to complications from gallbladder surgery.

The gothic quality of Lovecraft’s family life was matched by and perhaps carried over into his own interest in the macabre. In his father’s absence, Lovecraft found a substitute in his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, who entertained him with gothic tales of his own invention and introduced the young boy to children’s versions of the classics, including The Odyssey. A precocious reader, Lovecraft was apparently mesmerized by the Arabian Nights at age five (which led to his inventing for himself the name Abdul Alhazred, a figure subsequently incorporated into his fiction as the mad Arab and author of the book of forbidden occult knowledge, The Necronomicon), and then transfixed at age six by Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (likely the edition containing magnificently gloomy illustrations by Gustav Doré)—a work that was clearly among the principle literary influences shaping Lovecraft’s taste for weird fiction and one that is arguably reflected in The White Ship, an early tale included in this volume. Of even greater significance to Lovecraft’s artistic development was his discovery of Edgar Allan Poe in 1898. In typically arabesque prose, Lovecraft reflected on Poe’s influence, writing. It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I was the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!² Later in his life, the fantasy tales of Irish author Lord Dunsany would also exercise considerable influence on his artistic development.

Lovecraft himself suffered from a variety of health-related concerns—likely largely psychosomatic—and suffered a psychological breakdown of his own (the first of several) in 1898 at the tender age of eight. His official schooling as a result of his health issues was sporadic, but he compensated for his lack of formal education through voracious reading with particular interests in chemistry and astronomy; indeed, in his teenage years he produced his own scientific journals for circulation among family and friends. His first print publication in fact was related to astronomy: in 1906, at the age of sixteen, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal correcting an astrologer’s statement about the orbit of Mars. He subsequently wrote columns on astronomy for both a local rural newspaper and the Providence Sunday Journal. In 1908, he suffered another nervous breakdown, this time leading to his withdrawal from high school altogether after having finished only three years and without a diploma. The next five years he spent doing little but studying astronomy, writing a bit of poetry, and taking some correspondence courses.

What brought Lovecraft out of his shell was his association with the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA)—a relatively small group of amateur journalists who published journals and circulated them among themselves in the 1910s and 1920s. Lovecraft, who found the UAPA to be an encouraging venue in which to explore his literary interests, contributed poetry and essays to UAPA journals and published thirteen issues of his own journal, the Conservative—a periodical that reflected his own conservative cultural views. In 1916, his first published story, The Alchemist, appeared in the United Amateur, but it was not until six years later that he broke into professional fiction (at the age of thirty-one) with the publication of Herbert West—Reanimator (one of several stories to be adapted after Lovecraft’s death into lackluster horror films) in a semi-professional publication called Home Brew.

As Lovecraft moved beyond amateur magazines into the world of professional publications, the principle venue for his work became the celebrated pulp magazine Weird Tales, which was founded in 1923 and published the early work of such notable authors as Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Theodore Sturgeon. Lovecraft became a fixture in Weird Tales to such an extent that he was apparently offered the editorship of the magazine in 1924, a position that would have necessitated his relocation from New York to Chicago. For better or worse—likely worse, at least for Lovecraft—he rejected the offer, choosing to remain in New York with Sonia Haft Greene, a widowed Russian Jew seven years his senior, whom he married in March 1924 after a two-year courtship.

Lovecraft’s ill-fated marriage to Sonia is one of the more perplexing episodes in his life, given his notorious and frankly indefensible anti-Semitism. The only explanation critics have been able to suggest is that, flattered by her attentions, Lovecraft found Sonia secular and acculturated enough to allow him to overlook her religious background. However, while he may have been able to put aside concerns about her religious background, other troubles for the couple began soon after their wedding as Sonia was let go from a lucrative executive job at a New York department store and the two quickly found themselves subject to pressing financial concerns. Sonia attempted to open a hat shop but failed and then experienced health problems leading to a stay at a New Jersey sanitarium; Lovecraft tried to earn a living through a combination of writing, ghostwriting, and editing the work of others, supplemented by unsuccessful stints working for other businesses including a collection agency and a lamp-testing company. It is hard to say whether their relationship would have lasted had money not been such a pressing matter. As things stand, however, Sonia moved to the Midwest in 1925 to pursue several job opportunities and, after that, returned to New York only occasionally. The couple never lived together again and Sonia ultimately filed divorce papers in 1929 (papers which Lovecraft never actually signed).

After Sonia’s departure, the depressed Lovecraft moved into a single apartment near the Brooklyn slum known as Red Hook and his fiction from the period—such as The Horror at Red Hook and He included here—reflects his sense of loneliness and despondency in a city full of what he perceived as ominous foreigners. Then in 1926 in order to preserve his sanity, he abandoned New York altogether and returned to Providence, the place of his birth. Since his mother had died five years earlier, Lovecraft moved in with his two maternal aunts. This transition touched off the most fertile period in Lovecraft’s creative life: in a nine-month period between 1926 and 1927, he produced several of his best known and most celebrated works, including The Call of Cthulhu and The Colour Out of Space, and the novels The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Despite his best efforts, Lovecraft lamentably found it difficult to sell his increasingly lengthy and complicated later work and his revision efforts for others brought in diminishing returns. While he nurtured the careers of many young writers, including August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Fritz Leiber, becoming in the process one of the most prolific letter writers of the twentieth century (and producing a body of correspondence that Joshi speculates may one day be recognized as his greatest achievement³), his final years were plagued by poverty and hardship. In 1936, Lovecraft was saddened by the suicide of his correspondent Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan the Barbarian stories, and he himself succumbed to intestinal cancer on March 10, 1937, at the age of forty-seven, having never seen a true book publication of his work.

This collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, which spans much of the length of his sadly short career, showcases the diversity of his work and takes us from the tops of mountain peaks (The Other Gods and The Strange High House in the Mist) to the depths of the sea (The Temple), from Saharan desert sands (The Nameless City) to the labyrinthine streets of New York (The Horror at Red Hook), and from ancient Greece (The Tree) to millions of years in the future (He and Through the Gates of the Silver Key). Organizing this vast geographic and temporal range, however, is Lovecraft’s darkly satiric approach to mankind’s misguided sense of self-importance—call it Lovecraft’s Copernican revolution, his pricking of mankind’s pretensions to grandeur through the revelation that, rather than being at the center of the universe, human beings are really barely a blip on the radar at the outmost periphery of being. This theme takes the form of a pattern that recurs so insistently in Lovecraft’s fiction that it may be considered its fundamental organizing principle: the human quest for knowledge reveals mankind’s powerlessness, which the mind is not prepared to accept—the truth about humanity’s impotence and inconsequentiality in the larger scheme of things is inevitably catastrophic. Lovecraft handles this theme, however, in three characteristic ways that reflect the three main (and often overlapping) categories of his work: his Poe-inspired horror stories, his Lord Dunsany-inspired dream cycle stories, and his stories of cosmic horror that have come to be called his Cthulhu Mythos.

Lovecraft, as Joshi has observed, initially found in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe a model for both style and plot structure, and his early work, light on dialogue, heavy on narration, and overloaded with adjectives, clearly reflects Poe’s influence.⁴ In this volume, the stories The Tomb, The Moon-Bog, In the Vault, and The Shunned House fit this mold. The Tomb, one of Lovecraft’s earliest published stories (appearing in 1922), while leaving up in the air the exact nature of the phenomena experienced by the story’s first-person narrator, is arguably a tale of psychic possession in the same vein as Poe’s Ligeia. The Moon-Bog, which seems to derive its inspiration from Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, concerns a mansion in the midst of a gothic, haunted landscape and the uncanny forces that lurk beneath the surface of a swamp. And both In the Vault, a ghoulish tale of supernatural revenge, and The Shunned House, one of Lovecraft’s most straightforwardly supernatural stories, show the influence of Poe as filtered through American Gothic writer Ambrose Bierce. In essence, each of these fictions is a ghost story, a tale about haunted locations and the persistence of the past into the present. They insist upon an expanded conception of the universe in that the supernatural phenomena must be reconciled with the laws of physics as we know them. The tales, however, in good Poe-esque fashion, remain fairly local in scope, dealing as they do with specific protagonists who are haunted by very particular histories. While they imply more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in rationalist philosophy, they do not require the same sort of wholesale epistemological reevaluation necessitated by Lovecraft’s later tales of alien civilizations and extraterrestrial gods.

Like his Poe-inspired stories, Lovecraft’s tales in the vein of Lord Dunsany also deal with the persistence of the past into the present, but are less horrific stories of gruesome events than fantastic stories of unsatisfied desire and hubris that shift us out of the world we know into the realm of dreams. In 1919, the same year his mother experienced her psychological breakdown, Lovecraft discovered the work of Lord Dunsany, an Irish fantasy writer and dramatist, and spent the next two years writing Dunsany imitations. What Lovecraft found so appealing about Dunsany’s fiction was the remoteness of his fantasy lands, which come complete with their own gods, history, and geography.⁵ Lovecraft’s attempts to model his fiction after Dunsany are clearly evident here in the stories The White Ship, The Other Gods, Celephaïs, and The Strange High House in the Mist. Both The White Ship and The Other Gods are tales of hubris and loss of innocence, of human beings who push too far and desire too much. In The White Ship, lighthouse-keeper Basil Elton recalls a mystical journey into wondrous realms and his own refusal to be satisfied. In The Other Gods, Barzai the wise believes that his vast knowledge of the gods will allow him to look upon their faces unscathed and thus resolves to climb the forbidden mountain Hatheg-Kla. Both The White Ship and The Other Gods are tales of overreaching—in typically Lovecraftian style, of pursuing knowledge at all costs and with disastrous results. Celephaïs and The Strange High House in the Mist, by contrast, are less tales of hubris than of the desire for a world of wonders. In the former, a man stays young as long as he clings to the belief in the magical city of his youth, while in the latter philosopher Thomas Olney yearns for—and discovers—something apart from daily routine and well-disciplined thoughts. Taken together, the two stories offer a concise snapshot of both the promise and peril of fantastic fiction. The desire to escape from the world of mundane reality and to believe in something more is natural, but if one lingers too long in other realms, the danger is that one may never return—at least not entirely, or intact.

What differentiates Lovecraft’s Dunsany imitations from both his Poe-inspired stories and his later Cthulhu Mythos is their setting. These are not stories set in the world we know, but rather they take place in The Dreamlands, a fantasy world of marvelous cities, magical creatures, and strange gods. Associated with childhood, The Dreamlands is generally off-limits to adults, with the exception of rare, visionary dreamers who retain a link to childhood and a willingness to push beyond common boundaries. For those intrepid souls willing to venture outside time and space, the dubious reward is truth—knowledge of the beauty, horror, and fundamental strangeness of the world and of mankind’s peripheral role in its functioning. Lovecraft’s universe of dreams in this sense parallels the interruption of the supernatural in the Poe-esque tales through an insistence on an expanded understanding of the universe and the powers governing it.

The necessity of rethinking humanity’s place in the larger scheme of things is at the heart of the stories most commonly associated with Lovecraft—what have come to be called his Cthulhu Mythos (a name never used by Lovecraft himself), his collection of stories depicting alien civilizations and powerful extraterrestrial monsters referred to as gods. These stories, which vividly develop Lovecraft’s signature form of cosmic horror, foreground what critic David E. Schultz has referred to as Lovecraft’s anti-mythology, a "pseudomythology brutally show[ing] that man is not the center of the universe, that the ‘gods’ care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe."⁶ To an even greater extent than Lovecraft’s Poe- and Dunsany-inspired stories, his Cthulhu Mythos represent human beings as arrogant dupes of our own egotism—we think we’re the top of the food chain when, in reality, we’re on the same order of krill to intergalactic leviathans.

The stories in this volume develop this theme in three characteristically Lovecraftian ways which I will call the lost civilization approach, the degeneration approach, and the monsters among us approach. Lovecraft’s lost-civilization stories feature protagonists who uncover evidence of older civilizations—often alien civilizations having achieved social and scientific heights only aspired to by mankind—that either were destroyed entirely or still exist somewhere in debased form, generally below the surface of the earth. This theme is the premise of one of Lovecraft’s greatest works, his novella At the Mountains of Madness, and it is developed here in several stories, including The Temple, The Doom that Came to Sarnath, and The Nameless City. These stories, clearly influenced by Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic thesis in The Decline of the West (1918) that all civilizations eventually decline, seem to predict humanity’s own future fate (which is certainly the case in He). The sands of time are destined to sweep over our achievements as surely as they have those of Lovecraft’s lost civilizations.

Although decay and death are the inevitable fate of even the most advanced races in Lovecraft’s stories of lost civilizations, his tales of human degeneration take an inverted approach. These stories suggest that all humanity’s future achievements ultimately will be buried and forgotten, instead emphasize that, for all our pretensions to superiority, our civilized façade masks an underlying barbarity and we always have one foot on the slippery slope of evolutionary atavism and reversion. To put it another way, stories such as Lovecraft’s famous The Rats in the Walls or, featured here, The Lurking Fear, insist that human beings are only slightly removed from being animals and are always on the verge of regressing to an animalistic state. We carry our primitive past with us in our genes and we are, Lovecraft’s stories suggest, just as likely to go backward as forward.

While Lovecraft’s lost civilization and degeneration stories respectively point to an apocalyptic future and animalistic past, most unsettling of all are his monsters among us stories that depict the universe as a hostile place filled with all manner of horrific alien entities. In these stories, such as Lovecraft’s famous The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, human protagonists discover mankind’s vulnerable state and go mad as a result. While The Call of Cthulhu is the most notorious illustration of this theme, there is perhaps no better representation of this typically Lovecraftian concept than in From Beyond, featured in this volume. In this disquieting story, scientist and occult researcher Crawford Tillinghast invents a machine that extends human sensory perception beyond its normal limitations, revealing the loathsome monstrosities that surround us and that, should they become aware of us, possess the potential to destroy us.

Again and again in Lovecraft’s fiction, human beings in various ways catch glimpses of an expanded reality. His writing demands, as in his famous formulation in his treatise on horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature, that we tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.⁷ From the distant past to an apocalyptic future by way of an uncertain present, the stories collected here showcase Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, his literary meditation on mankind’s necessary but perilous self-delusion. The stellar winds that blow through Lovecraft’s fiction, bringing with them intimations of a beyond teeming with monstrous life, are chilling indeed.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of American literature and culture at Central Michigan University. He is the editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales and At the Mountains of Madness and Other Weird Tales for Barnes & Noble and has written extensively on uncanny fiction, cult film, and popular culture.

EDITOR’S NOTE

The commentary opening each chapter has been provided by S. T. Joshi.

THE TOMB

The first story written upon his resumption of fiction writing in the summer of 1917, The Tomb is one of Lovecraft’s most Poe-esque tales. He noted that the inspiration of the tale was a walk through a Providence cemetery, where he saw an old tombstone dating to 1711 (a date actually used in the story) and wondered, Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? The poem included in the story was written at an earlier date. The existing manuscript bears the title Gaudeamus (Let us delight) and is a surprising instance of a drinking song written by a teetotaler. The story first appeared in the Vagrant (March 1922).

Sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam.

—VIRGIL

IN RELATING THE CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH HAVE LED TO MY CONFINEMENT within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of waning moon—but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lighting. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call divine wrath in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briers, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal carvings above the arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalisingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was not frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgement to my readers when they shall have learnt all.

The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. With the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideas regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister family of the burned-down mansion was in some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward. The odour of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.

The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of Plutarch’s Lives in the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny whenever he should become old enough to lift its enormous weight. This legend had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.

Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those churchyards and places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to power. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his mound-covered coffin on the day after interment.

But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the unexpected genealogical discover that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this older and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might pass within that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed the habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favourite hours of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small clearing in the thicket before the mould-stained facade of the hillside, allowing the surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.

The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of those tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain uncanny differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed, my attention was distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulchre. I do not think I was either astounded or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.

It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the abandoned slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me and descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way; and though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the musty, charnel-house air. Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains of coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well-preserved and untenanted casket, adorned with a single name which brought to me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.

In the grey light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the chain of the door behind me. I was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters had chilled my bodily frame. Early rising villagers who observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marvelled at the signs of ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and solitary. I did not appear before my parents till after a long and refreshing sleep.

Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal. My speech, always susceptible to environmental influences, was the first thing to succumb to the change; and my suddenly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer boldness and recklessness came into my demeanour, till I unconsciously grew to possess the bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered the flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits and rimesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of eighteenth-century Bacchanalian mirth; a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like this:

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,

And drink to the present before it shall fail;

Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,

For ’tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:

So fill up your glass,

For life will soon pass;

When you’re dead ye’ll ne’er drink to your king or your lass!

Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;

But what’s a red nose if ye’re happy and gay?

Gad split me! I’d rather be red whilst I’m here,

Than white as a lily—and dead half a year!

So Betty, my miss,

Come give me kiss;

In hell there’s no innkeeper’s daughter like this!

Young Harry, propp’d up just as straight as he’s able,

Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table;

But fill up your goblets and pass ’em around—

Better under the table than under the ground!

So revel and chaff

As ye thirstily quaff:

Under six feet of dirt ’tis less easy to laugh!

The fiend strike me blue! I’m scarce able to walk,

And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!

Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;

I’ll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!

So lend me a hand;

I’m not able to stand,

But I’m gay whilst I linger on top of the land!

About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house whenever the heavens threatened an electrical display. A favourite haunt of mine during the day was the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture the structure as it had been in its prime. On one occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shallow sub-cellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had been unseen and forgotten for many generations.

At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered manner and appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over my movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purpose with religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in threading the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck, its presence known only to me. I never carried out of the sepulchre any of the things I came upon whilst within its walls.

One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the portal with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower was discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not accost me, so I hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to my careworn father. Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonishment on hearing the spy inform