August 21, 2025 • 22 mins
The Call of Cthulhu is a literary masterpiece that stands as one of the greatest achievements in the world of fiction. H.P. Lovecraft has carved out a unique niche in literature, exploring realms beyond our comprehension. As Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, aptly put it, Lovecraft grasps the mysteries that elude us. Originally published on Legamus.eu and later released on Librivox when U.S. copyright allowed, this recording is a must-listen for fans of the genre. — Summary by Martin Reyto
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter one of the Call of Cthulhu by h pl
of Craft. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings
are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,
please visit LibriVox dot org. Read by Martin Rato. Of
(00:27):
such great powers or beings, there may be conceivably a survival,
a survival of the hugely remote period when consciousness was manifested,
perhaps in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the
tide of advancing humanity, forms of which poetry and legend
alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,
(00:52):
mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. Aldronon Blackwood, Chapter one,
The Horror and Clay. The most merciful thing in the world,
I think, is the inability of the human mind to
(01:13):
correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island
of ignorance, in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little. But some day the piecing together of
(01:34):
dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality
and of our frightful position therein that we shall either
go mad from the revelation or flee from the light
into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle,
(01:55):
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They
have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze
the blood if not masked by bland optimism. But it
is not from them that there came the single glimpse
of forbidden aos, which chills me when I think of
it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
(02:19):
like all dead glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things, in this case an
old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.
I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out. Certainly,
if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link
(02:40):
in so hideous a jane. I think that the professor
too intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew,
and that he would have destroyed his notes had not
sudden death seized him. My knowledge of the thing began
in the winter of nineteen twenty six twenty seven with
the death of my great uncle called George Gammel Angell,
(03:02):
Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient
inscriptions and had frequently been resorted to by the heads
of prominent museums, so that his passing at the age
of ninety two may be recalled by many locally. Interest
(03:24):
was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death.
The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Nieuport boat,
falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by
a nautical looking negro who had come from one of
the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed
(03:45):
a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased home
in William Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder,
but concluded after a perplexed debate that some obscure lesion
of the heart induced by the brisk ascent of so
steep a hilld by so elderly a man, was responsible
for the end At the time I saw no reason
(04:08):
to descend from this dictum. But latterly I am inclined
to wonder, and more than wonder. As my great uncle's
heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I
was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness,
and for that purpose moved his entire set of files
(04:31):
and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the
material which I correlated will be later published by the
American Archaeological Society. But there was one box which I
found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from
showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I
(04:51):
did not find the key till it occurred to me
to examine the personal ring which the professor carried in
his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeed head in opening it,
but when I did so, seemed only to be confronted
by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what
could be the meaning of the queer clay bar relief
(05:11):
and the disjointed jottings, ramblings and cuttings which I found.
Had my uncle and his latter years become credulous of
the most superficial impostors I resolved to search out the
eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old
man's peace of mind. The bar relief was a rough rectangle,
(05:34):
less than an inch thick and about five by six
inches in area, obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however,
were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion, For although
the vagaries of Cubism and futurism are many and wild,
they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks
(05:55):
in prehistoric writing and writing of some kind. The bulk
of these designs seemed certainly to be though my memory,
despite much of the papers and collections of my uncle,
failed in any way to identify this particular species or
even hint at its remotest affiliations. Above these apparent hieroglyphics
(06:18):
was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution,
forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed
to be a sort of monster or symbol, representing a
monster of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive.
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous
(06:41):
pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.
I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.
A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted by a grotesque and scaly
body with rudimentary wings. But it was the general outline
of the whole which which made it most shockingly frightful.
(07:03):
Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean
architectural background. The writing accompanying this oddity was aside from
a stack of press cuttings and Professor Angell's most recent hand,
and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to
be the main document was headed Cuthulhu cult and Characters,
(07:27):
painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word
so unheard of. This manuscript was divided into two sections,
the first of which was headed nineteen twenty five Dream
and dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, seven Thomas Street, Providence,
Rhode Island, and the second narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse,
(07:54):
one twenty one Beanville Street, New Orleans, Louisiana at nineteen
oh eight as meeting notes on same and Professor Webb's account.
The other manuscript papers were brief notes, some of them
accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of
them citations from theosophical books and magazines, notably W. Scott
(08:19):
Elliot's Atlantis and the Los Limuria, and the rest comments
on long surviving secret societies and hidden cults with references
to passages and such mythological and anthropological source books as
Fraser's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch Cult. In Western Europe,
(08:41):
the cuttings largely alluded to utre mental illness and outbreaks
of group folly Armenia in the spring of nineteen twenty five.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very
particular tale. It appears that on March first, nineteen twenty five,
a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect
(09:03):
had called upon Professor Angel bearing the singular clay bar relief,
which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore
the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had
recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family
slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture
(09:23):
at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone
at the Flurderly building near that institution. Wilcox was a
precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had
from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd
dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called
(09:44):
himself psychically hypersensitive, but the staid folk of the ancient
commercial city he dismissed him as merely queer, Never mingling
much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social
visibility and was now known only to a small group
of esthets from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club,
(10:06):
anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit ran the professor's manuscript,
the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's
archaeological knowledge, and identifying the hieroglyphics of the bar relief.
He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose
(10:28):
and alienated sympathy. And my uncle showed some sharpness in
replying for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet, and applied
kinship with anything but archaeology. Young will Cox's rejoinder, which
impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and recorded verbatim,
was of a fantastically poetic caste, which must have typified
(10:50):
his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly
characteristic of him. He said, it is new indeed, for
I made a last night in the dream of strange cities,
and dreamed of older than brooding tire or the contemplative sphinx,
or garden girdled Babylon. It was then that he began
(11:16):
that rambling tale, which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory
and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had
been a straight earthquake tremor the night before, the most
considerable felt in New England for some years, and Wilcox's
imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he'd had an
(11:37):
unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities, of titan blocks and
sky flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister
with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars,
and from some undetermined point below had come a voice
that was not a voice, a chaotic sensation which only
(12:00):
only fancies could transmute. Into sound, but which he attempted
to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters gutholou potagen.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which
excited and disturbed Professor Angel. He questioned the sculptor with
(12:23):
scientific minuteness and studied with frantic intensity the bar relief
on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and
clad only in his night clothes, when waking had stolen
bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox
afterwards said, for his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyphics and
(12:46):
pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out of
place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect
the latter with strange cults or societies, and Wilcox could
not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was
offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some
(13:07):
widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angel became
convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult
or system of cryptochlore, he beseeched his visitor with demands
for future reports. Of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for
after the first interview, the manuscript records daily calls of
(13:30):
the young man, during which he related startling fragments of
nocturnal imaginary, whose burden was always some terrible cyclopean vista
of dark and dripping stone, with a subterane voice or
intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense, impacts uninscribable save as gibberish.
(13:53):
The two sounds frequently repeated are those rendered by the
letters Cathulhu and lelle. On March twenty third, the manuscript continued,
Willcox failed to appear, and inquiries at his quarters revealed
that he'd been stricken with an obscure sort of fever
(14:14):
and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street.
He had cried out in the night, arousing several other
artists in the building, and had manifested since then only
alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned
the family, and from that time forward kept close watch
(14:34):
of the case, calling often at the Tayre Street office
of doctor Toby, whom he learned to be in charge
the youth's febrile mind. Apparently was dwelling on strange things,
and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke
of them. They included not only a repetition of what
he'd formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing
(15:00):
sales high, which walked or lumbered about. He at no
time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as
repeated by Doctor Toby, convinced the professor that it must
be identical with the nameless monstrosity he sought to depict
in his dream sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added,
(15:22):
was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy.
His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal, but
the whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true
fever rather than mental disorder. On April second, at about
three p m. Every trace of Bill Cox's melody suddenly ceased.
(15:45):
He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at
home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream
or reality since the night of March twenty second. Pronounced
well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in
three days, but to Professor Angell he was of no
further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with
(16:09):
his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his
night thoughts. After a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts
of thoroughly usual visions, here the first part of the
manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes
gave me much material for thought, So much, in fact,
(16:31):
that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy can
account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes
in question were those descriptive of the dream of various
persons covering the same period as that in which young
Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems,
(16:51):
had quickly instituted a prodigiously far flung body of inquiries
amongst nearly all of the friends whom he could question
without impertinence, asking for knightly reports of their dreams and
the dates of any notable visions for some time past.
The reception of his request seems to have varied, but
(17:11):
he must, at the very least have received more responses
than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.
This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed
a thorough and really significant digest average people in society
and business. New England's traditional salt of the earth gave
(17:33):
an almost completely negative result. Those scattered cases of uneasy
but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there always between
March twenty third and April second, the period of Young
Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four
(17:54):
cases of vague descriptions suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes,
and in one case there is mentioned a dread of
something abnormal. It was from the artists and poets that
the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would
have broken loose had they been able to compare notes,
(18:16):
as it was, lacking their original letters. I half suspected
the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence and corroboration of what he had latently
resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel
that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of the old data which my
(18:36):
uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientists.
These responses from esthetes told disturbing tales from February twenty
eighth to April second, A large proportion of them had
dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being
immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculpture delirium.
(19:02):
Over a fourth of those who reported anything reported scenes
and half sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described,
and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic,
nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the
note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a
(19:23):
widely known architect with leanings towards theosophy and occultism, went
violently insane on the date of Young Wilcox's seizure, and
expired several months later after incessant screaming to be saved
from some escape denizen of Hell. Had my uncle referred
to these cases by name instead of merely by number,
(19:46):
I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation, but
as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few.
All of these, however, bore out the notes in full.
I have often wondered if all the objects of the
Professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It
(20:09):
is well that no explanation shall ever reach them. The
press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of
panic mania and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell
must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of
extracts was tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe.
(20:31):
Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone
sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here,
likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper
in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future
from visions he is seen. A dispatch from California, it
describes a theosophist colony as Donny White robes armed mass
(20:56):
for some glorious fulfillment which never arrives, whilst items from
Indias regardedly of serious native unrest. Toward the end of
March twenty second, twenty third, the West of Ireland too
is full of wild rumor and legendary and a fantastic
painter named Arduis Bunaut hangs a blasphemous dream landscape in
(21:20):
the Paris Spring Salon of nineteen twenty six. And so
numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums that only
a miracle can have stopped the medical Fraternity from noting
strange parallelisms and strawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings,
all told, and I can, at this state scarcely envisage
(21:43):
the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But
I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of
the older matters mentioned by the Professor end of Chapter one,
Chapter one of the Call of Cthulhu by h pl
of Craft. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings
are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,
please visit LibriVox dot org. Read by Martin Rato. Of
(00:27):
such great powers or beings, there may be conceivably a survival,
a survival of the hugely remote period when consciousness was manifested,
perhaps in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the
tide of advancing humanity, forms of which poetry and legend
alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,
(00:52):
mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. Aldronon Blackwood, Chapter one,
The Horror and Clay. The most merciful thing in the world,
I think, is the inability of the human mind to
(01:13):
correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island
of ignorance, in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little. But some day the piecing together of
(01:34):
dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality
and of our frightful position therein that we shall either
go mad from the revelation or flee from the light
into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle,
(01:55):
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They
have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze
the blood if not masked by bland optimism. But it
is not from them that there came the single glimpse
of forbidden aos, which chills me when I think of
it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
(02:19):
like all dead glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things, in this case an
old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.
I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out. Certainly,
if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link
(02:40):
in so hideous a jane. I think that the professor
too intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew,
and that he would have destroyed his notes had not
sudden death seized him. My knowledge of the thing began
in the winter of nineteen twenty six twenty seven with
the death of my great uncle called George Gammel Angell,
(03:02):
Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient
inscriptions and had frequently been resorted to by the heads
of prominent museums, so that his passing at the age
of ninety two may be recalled by many locally. Interest
(03:24):
was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death.
The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Nieuport boat,
falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by
a nautical looking negro who had come from one of
the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed
(03:45):
a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased home
in William Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder,
but concluded after a perplexed debate that some obscure lesion
of the heart induced by the brisk ascent of so
steep a hilld by so elderly a man, was responsible
for the end At the time I saw no reason
(04:08):
to descend from this dictum. But latterly I am inclined
to wonder, and more than wonder. As my great uncle's
heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I
was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness,
and for that purpose moved his entire set of files
(04:31):
and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the
material which I correlated will be later published by the
American Archaeological Society. But there was one box which I
found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from
showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I
(04:51):
did not find the key till it occurred to me
to examine the personal ring which the professor carried in
his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeed head in opening it,
but when I did so, seemed only to be confronted
by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what
could be the meaning of the queer clay bar relief
(05:11):
and the disjointed jottings, ramblings and cuttings which I found.
Had my uncle and his latter years become credulous of
the most superficial impostors I resolved to search out the
eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old
man's peace of mind. The bar relief was a rough rectangle,
(05:34):
less than an inch thick and about five by six
inches in area, obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however,
were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion, For although
the vagaries of Cubism and futurism are many and wild,
they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks
(05:55):
in prehistoric writing and writing of some kind. The bulk
of these designs seemed certainly to be though my memory,
despite much of the papers and collections of my uncle,
failed in any way to identify this particular species or
even hint at its remotest affiliations. Above these apparent hieroglyphics
(06:18):
was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution,
forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed
to be a sort of monster or symbol, representing a
monster of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive.
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous
(06:41):
pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.
I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.
A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted by a grotesque and scaly
body with rudimentary wings. But it was the general outline
of the whole which which made it most shockingly frightful.
(07:03):
Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean
architectural background. The writing accompanying this oddity was aside from
a stack of press cuttings and Professor Angell's most recent hand,
and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to
be the main document was headed Cuthulhu cult and Characters,
(07:27):
painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word
so unheard of. This manuscript was divided into two sections,
the first of which was headed nineteen twenty five Dream
and dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, seven Thomas Street, Providence,
Rhode Island, and the second narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse,
(07:54):
one twenty one Beanville Street, New Orleans, Louisiana at nineteen
oh eight as meeting notes on same and Professor Webb's account.
The other manuscript papers were brief notes, some of them
accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of
them citations from theosophical books and magazines, notably W. Scott
(08:19):
Elliot's Atlantis and the Los Limuria, and the rest comments
on long surviving secret societies and hidden cults with references
to passages and such mythological and anthropological source books as
Fraser's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch Cult. In Western Europe,
(08:41):
the cuttings largely alluded to utre mental illness and outbreaks
of group folly Armenia in the spring of nineteen twenty five.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very
particular tale. It appears that on March first, nineteen twenty five,
a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect
(09:03):
had called upon Professor Angel bearing the singular clay bar relief,
which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore
the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had
recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family
slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture
(09:23):
at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone
at the Flurderly building near that institution. Wilcox was a
precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had
from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd
dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called
(09:44):
himself psychically hypersensitive, but the staid folk of the ancient
commercial city he dismissed him as merely queer, Never mingling
much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social
visibility and was now known only to a small group
of esthets from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club,
(10:06):
anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit ran the professor's manuscript,
the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's
archaeological knowledge, and identifying the hieroglyphics of the bar relief.
He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose
(10:28):
and alienated sympathy. And my uncle showed some sharpness in
replying for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet, and applied
kinship with anything but archaeology. Young will Cox's rejoinder, which
impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and recorded verbatim,
was of a fantastically poetic caste, which must have typified
(10:50):
his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly
characteristic of him. He said, it is new indeed, for
I made a last night in the dream of strange cities,
and dreamed of older than brooding tire or the contemplative sphinx,
or garden girdled Babylon. It was then that he began
(11:16):
that rambling tale, which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory
and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had
been a straight earthquake tremor the night before, the most
considerable felt in New England for some years, and Wilcox's
imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he'd had an
(11:37):
unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities, of titan blocks and
sky flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister
with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars,
and from some undetermined point below had come a voice
that was not a voice, a chaotic sensation which only
(12:00):
only fancies could transmute. Into sound, but which he attempted
to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters gutholou potagen.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which
excited and disturbed Professor Angel. He questioned the sculptor with
(12:23):
scientific minuteness and studied with frantic intensity the bar relief
on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and
clad only in his night clothes, when waking had stolen
bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox
afterwards said, for his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyphics and
(12:46):
pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out of
place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect
the latter with strange cults or societies, and Wilcox could
not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was
offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some
(13:07):
widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angel became
convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult
or system of cryptochlore, he beseeched his visitor with demands
for future reports. Of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for
after the first interview, the manuscript records daily calls of
(13:30):
the young man, during which he related startling fragments of
nocturnal imaginary, whose burden was always some terrible cyclopean vista
of dark and dripping stone, with a subterane voice or
intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense, impacts uninscribable save as gibberish.
(13:53):
The two sounds frequently repeated are those rendered by the
letters Cathulhu and lelle. On March twenty third, the manuscript continued,
Willcox failed to appear, and inquiries at his quarters revealed
that he'd been stricken with an obscure sort of fever
(14:14):
and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street.
He had cried out in the night, arousing several other
artists in the building, and had manifested since then only
alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned
the family, and from that time forward kept close watch
(14:34):
of the case, calling often at the Tayre Street office
of doctor Toby, whom he learned to be in charge
the youth's febrile mind. Apparently was dwelling on strange things,
and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke
of them. They included not only a repetition of what
he'd formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing
(15:00):
sales high, which walked or lumbered about. He at no
time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as
repeated by Doctor Toby, convinced the professor that it must
be identical with the nameless monstrosity he sought to depict
in his dream sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added,
(15:22):
was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy.
His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal, but
the whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true
fever rather than mental disorder. On April second, at about
three p m. Every trace of Bill Cox's melody suddenly ceased.
(15:45):
He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at
home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream
or reality since the night of March twenty second. Pronounced
well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in
three days, but to Professor Angell he was of no
further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with
(16:09):
his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his
night thoughts. After a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts
of thoroughly usual visions, here the first part of the
manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes
gave me much material for thought, So much, in fact,
(16:31):
that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy can
account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes
in question were those descriptive of the dream of various
persons covering the same period as that in which young
Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems,
(16:51):
had quickly instituted a prodigiously far flung body of inquiries
amongst nearly all of the friends whom he could question
without impertinence, asking for knightly reports of their dreams and
the dates of any notable visions for some time past.
The reception of his request seems to have varied, but
(17:11):
he must, at the very least have received more responses
than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.
This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed
a thorough and really significant digest average people in society
and business. New England's traditional salt of the earth gave
(17:33):
an almost completely negative result. Those scattered cases of uneasy
but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there always between
March twenty third and April second, the period of Young
Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four
(17:54):
cases of vague descriptions suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes,
and in one case there is mentioned a dread of
something abnormal. It was from the artists and poets that
the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would
have broken loose had they been able to compare notes,
(18:16):
as it was, lacking their original letters. I half suspected
the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence and corroboration of what he had latently
resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel
that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of the old data which my
(18:36):
uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientists.
These responses from esthetes told disturbing tales from February twenty
eighth to April second, A large proportion of them had
dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being
immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculpture delirium.
(19:02):
Over a fourth of those who reported anything reported scenes
and half sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described,
and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic,
nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the
note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a
(19:23):
widely known architect with leanings towards theosophy and occultism, went
violently insane on the date of Young Wilcox's seizure, and
expired several months later after incessant screaming to be saved
from some escape denizen of Hell. Had my uncle referred
to these cases by name instead of merely by number,
(19:46):
I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation, but
as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few.
All of these, however, bore out the notes in full.
I have often wondered if all the objects of the
Professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It
(20:09):
is well that no explanation shall ever reach them. The
press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of
panic mania and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell
must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of
extracts was tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe.
(20:31):
Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone
sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here,
likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper
in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future
from visions he is seen. A dispatch from California, it
describes a theosophist colony as Donny White robes armed mass
(20:56):
for some glorious fulfillment which never arrives, whilst items from
Indias regardedly of serious native unrest. Toward the end of
March twenty second, twenty third, the West of Ireland too
is full of wild rumor and legendary and a fantastic
painter named Arduis Bunaut hangs a blasphemous dream landscape in
(21:20):
the Paris Spring Salon of nineteen twenty six. And so
numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums that only
a miracle can have stopped the medical Fraternity from noting
strange parallelisms and strawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings,
all told, and I can, at this state scarcely envisage
(21:43):
the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But
I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of
the older matters mentioned by the Professor end of Chapter one,
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