August 21, 2025 • 37 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 two of the Call of Cthulhu by H. Pel
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, Chapter two,
(00:26):
the Tale of Inspector le Grasse. The older matters which
had made the sculptor's dream and bar relief so significant
to my uncle, formed the subject of the second half
of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell
had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled
(00:49):
over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which
can be rendered only as Cthulhu. And all this and
so stirring at horror, a connection that at a small
wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in nineteen o eight, seventeen
(01:11):
years before, when the American Archeological Society held its annual
meeting in Saint Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of
his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in
all the deliberations and was one of the first to
be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of
(01:32):
the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems
for expert solution. The chief of these outsiders, and in
a short time, the focus of interest for the entire meeting,
was a commonplace looking middle aged man who had traveled
all the way from New Orleans for certain special information
(01:54):
unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond
le Grat, and he was by profession and a specter
of police.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
With him. He bore the subject of his visit a grotesque, repulsive,
and apparently very ancient stone statuette, whose origin he was
at a loss to determine. It was not to be
fancied that Inspector le Grasse had the least interest in archaeology.
On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by
(02:25):
purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was,
had been captured some months before in the wooded swamp
south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed
voodoo meeting, and so singular and hideous were the rites
connected with it that the police could not but realize
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that they had stumbled on a dark cult, totally unknown
to them and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest
of the African voodoo circles of its origin. Apart from
the year erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members,
absolutely nothing was to be discovered, hence the anxiety of
(03:09):
the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them
place the frightful symbol and through it tracked down the
cult to its fountain head. As specter Legrasse was scarcely
prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight
of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled
men of science into a state of tense excitement, and
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they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze
at the diminutive figure, whose utter strangeness and air of
genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently it unopened and archaic vistas.
No recognized school of sculpture had animated this terrible object,
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yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in
its dim and greener surface of a playable stone. The figure,
which was finally passed slowly from man to man for
close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches
in height and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a
(04:16):
monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus like
head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly,
rubbery looking body, prodigious claws on hind and four feet
and long narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct
(04:37):
with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat
bloated corpulence and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings
touched the back edge of the block. The seat occupied
the center, whilst the long curved claws of the doubled
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up crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended
a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of
the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward so that
the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of
huge forepaws, which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect
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of the whole was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly
fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast,
awesome and incalculable age was unmistakable, Yet not one link
did it show with any known type of art belonging
to civilization's youth, or indeed to any other time. Totally
(05:44):
separate and apart, its very material was a mystery for
the soapy, greenish black stone, with its golden or iridescent
flex and striations, resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.
The characters along the base were equally baffling, and no
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member present, despite a representation of half the world's expert
learning in this field, could form the least notion of
even their remotest linguistic kinship. They like, the subject and
material belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind
as we know it, something frightfully suggestive of old and
(06:27):
unhallow cycles of life in which our world and our
conceptions have no part. And yet, as the members severally
shook their heads and confessed to feat at the inspector's problem,
there was one man in that gathering who suspected a
touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing,
(06:49):
and who presently told with some diffidence of the art
trifle he knew this person was the late William Channing Webb,
Professor of Anthropology and Princeton University, and an explorer of
no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged forty eight
years before in a tour of Greenland at Iceland in
(07:11):
search of some runic inscriptions, which he failed to unearth,
and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast, had
encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos, whose religion,
a curious form of devil worship, chilled him with its
deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
(07:33):
other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shutters,
saying that it had come down from horribly ancient AONs
before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rights and
human sacrifices, there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to
a supreme elder devil or tornassuk, and of this Professor
(07:56):
Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged
Ankakok or wizard priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters,
as best he knew how, But just now of prime
significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished and
around which they had danced when the Aurora leaped high
(08:16):
over the ice cliffs. It was, the Professor stated, a
very crude bar relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture
of some cryptic writing, and so far as he could tell,
it was a rough parallel in all essential features of
the bestial thing now lying before the meeting. This data,
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received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved
doubly exciting to Inspector le Grasse, and he began at
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and
copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult worshipers his
men had arrested, he besought the Professor to remember, as
(08:59):
best team mane the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos.
There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a
moment of really odd silence, when both detective and scientists
agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to
two Hellish rituals. So many worlds of distance apart, what
(09:22):
in substance both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp
priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very
like this, The word divisions being guessed at from traditional
breaks in the phrases chanted aloud ghluy manafkthl lea knaglftan
(09:46):
the grass had one point in advance of Professor Webb,
for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him
what older celebrants had told them. The words meant. This text,
as given, ran something like this in his house at Realia,
dead Cuthulhu waits dreaming, And now, in response to a
(10:12):
general and urgent demand, Inspector Lagrass related as fully as
possible his experience with the swamp worshippers, telling a story
to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance.
It savored of the wildest dreams of mythmaker and theosophist,
and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such
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half castes and pariahs as might be least expected to
possess it. On November one, nineteen oh seven, there had
come to the New Orleans Police a frantic summons from
the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatter's there,
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mostly primitive but good natured descendants of fit Its men
were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown
thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It
was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort
than they had ever known, and some of their women
and children had disappeared since the malevolent Tom Tom had
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begun its incessant beating. Far within the black haunted woods
were no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams,
soul chilling chants, and dancing devil flames, and the frightened
messenger added that people could stand it no more so.
(11:41):
A body of twenty police filling two carriages and an
automobile had set out in the late afternoon with a
shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the
passable road, they alighted, and for miles splashed on in
silence through the terrible cypress woods were never came. Ugly
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roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them,
And now and then a pile of dank stones of
fragment of a rotting wall, intensified by its hint of
morbid habitation, a depression which every male formed tree and
every fungus islet combined to create at length the squatter settlement,
(12:27):
a miserable huddle of huts hove in sight, and hysterical
dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns.
The muffled beat of Tom Tom's was now faintly audible
far far ahead, and a curdling shriek came at infrequent
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intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare two seemed
to filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of
forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each
one of the Count's squatters refused point blank to advance
another inch toward the scene of unholy worship. So Inspector
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la Grasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on, unguided, into
black arcades of horror that none of them had ever
trod before. The region now entered by the police was
one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by
white men. There were legends of a hidden lake, unglimpsed
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by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless, white
polypus thing with luminous eyes, and squatters whispered that bat
winged devils flew up out of caverns and inner earth
to worship it at midnight. They said it had been
there before Deberville, before LaSalle, before the Indians, and before
(13:58):
even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It
was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die.
But it made men dream, and so they knew enough
to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was indeed on
the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location
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was bad enough. Hence, perhaps the very place of the
worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds
and incidents. Only poetry or madness could do justice to
the noises heard by the Grass's men as they plowed
on through the black morass toward the red glare and
(14:44):
muffled tom toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men,
and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts, and it is terrible
to hear the one when the sore should yield the other.
Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniak
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heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated
through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs
of Hell. Now and then the less organized udulation would cease,
and from what seemed a well drilled chorus of hoarse
voices would rise and singh song, chant that hideous phrase
(15:29):
or ritual glory um da kathuru Releier Macnagle photogon. Then
the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner,
came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of
them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a
(15:53):
frantic cry, which the matt cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened.
The grass dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy
(16:13):
island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and
tolerably dry. On this now leaked and twisted a more
indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a syme
or an anger rolla could paint void of clothing. This
(16:34):
hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous
ring shaped bonfire, in the center of which, revealed by
occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great
granite monolith some eight feet in height, on top of which,
(16:55):
incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carvage statuette. From
a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular
intervals with the flame girt monolith as a center, hung
head downward the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters
(17:17):
who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the
ring of worshipers jumped and roared, the general direction of
the mass motion being from left to right, an endless back,
and all between the ring of bodies and the ring
of fire. It may have been only imagination, that it
(17:40):
may have been only echoes, which induced one of the men,
an excitable Spaniard, to fancy herd antiphonal responses to the ritual.
From some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood
of ancient legendary and horror, This man, Joseph D. Galvez I,
laid her and questioned, and he proved distractingly imaginative. He
(18:05):
indeed went so far as to hint of the faint
beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining
eyes in the mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees.
But I suppose he'd been hearing too much native superstition. Actually,
the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration.
(18:27):
Duty came first, and although there must have been nearly
one hundred mongrels celebrants in the throng, the police relied
on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseest route
for five minutes. The resultant din and chaos were beyond description.
Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made.
(18:51):
But in the end the Grass was able to count
some forty seven sellen prisoners, whom he forced to dress
in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen.
Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded
ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow prisoners.
(19:12):
The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed
and carried back by the grass. Examined at headquarters after
a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all
proved to be men of a very low, mixed blooded,
and mentally aberrent type. Most were Seamen, and a sprinkling
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of Negroes and Mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese
from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a coloring of voodooism
to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked,
it became manifest that something far deeper and older than
Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were,
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the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea
of their loathsome faith they worshiped, so they said, the
great old ones, who lived ages before there were any men,
and who came to the young world out of the sky.
Those old ones were gone now inside the earth and
(20:22):
under the sea. But their dead bodies had told their
secrets and dreams to the first men, who formed a
cult which had never died. This was that cult, and
the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist,
hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the
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world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from
his dark house in the mighty city of Reliah under
the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call when the stars
were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting
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to liberate him. Meanwhile, no more must be told. There
was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind
was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth.
For shapes came out of the dark to visit the
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faithful few. But these were not the great old ones.
No man had ever seen the old ones. The carven
Idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or
not the others were precisely like him. No one could
read the old writing now, but things were told by
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word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret
that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant
only this. In his house at Uliah, dead Kathulhu waits dreaming.
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Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to
be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.
All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred
that the killing had been done by black winged ones
which had come to them from their immemorial meeting place
in the Haunted Wood. But of those mysterious allies, no
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coherent account could ever be gained. But the police did
extract came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro,
who claimed to have sailed to the strange ports and
talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains
of China. Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that
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paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the
world seem recent and transient. Indeed, there had been AONs
when other things ruled on the earth, and they had
had great cities. Remains of them, he said, The deathless
Chinamen had told him were still to be found Encyclopean
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stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast
epochs of time before men came, but there were arts
which could revive them when the stars had come around
again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity.
They had indeed come themselves from the stars and brought
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their images with them. These great old ones, Castro continued,
were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape,
for did not the starfash image prove it, But that
shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right,
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they could plunge from world to whirl through the sky.
But when the stars were wrong, they could not live.
But although they no longer lived, they would never really die.
They all lay in stone houses in their great city
of Ralie, preserved by the spells of mighty Kuthuhu, for
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a glorious resurrection, when the stars and the earth might
once more be.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Ready for them.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
But at that time some force from outside must serve
to liberate their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact
likewise prevented them from making an initial move, and they
could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst
uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that
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was occurring in the universe, for their mode of speech
was transmitted thought. Even now they talked in their tombs.
When after infinities of chaos the first men came, the
great old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by
molding their dreams, for only thus could their language reach
(25:21):
the fleshly minds of mammals. Then whispered Castro. Those first
men formed the cult around tall idols which the Great
Ones showed them, idols brought in dim eras from dark stars.
That cult would never die till the stars came right again,
(25:44):
and the secret priests would take Great Cathulu from his
tomb to revive his subjects and resume his rule of earth.
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind
would have become as the Great Old Ones, free and
wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals
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thrown aside, and all men shouting and killing and reveling
in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them
new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves,
and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of
ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile, the cult, by appropriate rites, must
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keep alive the memory of those ancient ways in shadow
for the prophecy of their return. In the elder times,
chosen men had talked with the entombed old Ones and dreams.
But then something happened. The great stone city, Realia, with
its monoliths and sepulchers, had sunk beneath the waves and
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the deep waters full of the one Prime walan mystery
through which not even thought can pass, had cut off
the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high
priests said that the city would rise again when the
stars were right. Then came out of the earth, the
(27:19):
black spirits of earth, moldy and shadowy and full of
dim rumors, picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea bottoms.
But of them Old Castro dared not speak much. He
cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of
(27:43):
the old ones too, he curiously declined to mention of
the cult. He said that he thought the center lay
amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where erem the city
of pillars, dreams, hidden and untouched. It was not a
lie to the European which cult and was virtually unknown
(28:05):
beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it.
Though the Deathless Chinaman said that there were double meanings
in the necronomicon of the mad Arab abdul Alhazread, which
the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much
discussed couplet that is not dead, which can eternal lie
(28:29):
and with strange AONs even death may die. The Grass,
deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in
vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro apparently
had told the truth when he said that it was
wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no
(28:53):
light upon either cult or image. And now the detective
had come to the highest authority in the country and
met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by La Grasse's tale,
corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in
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the subsequent correspondence of those who attended. Although scant mention
occurs in the formal publications of society, caution is the
first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanrie and imposture.
The Grass, for some time lent the image to Professor Webb,
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but at the latter's death that was returned to him
and remains in his possession. Where I viewed it not
long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably
akin to the dream sculpture of young Wilcox that my
uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor. I
did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing
(29:58):
after a knowledge of what the had learned of the
cult of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not
only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the Swamp Found
Image and the Greenland Double Tablet, but had come in
his dreams upon at least three of the precise words
of the formula, uttered alike by Eskimo, Diabolists and Mongrel Louisianas.
(30:21):
Professor Angell's instant start on an investigation of the utmost
thoroughness was eminently natural, though privately I suspected young Wilcox
of having heard of the cult in some indirect way,
of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and
continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream narratives
(30:43):
and cuttings collected by the Professor were of course strong corroboration,
but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of
the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought
the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the man
his script again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes
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with the cult narrative of La Grasse. I made a
trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him
the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon
a learned and aged man. Willcox still lived alone in
the Fleur de Lee building in Thomas Street, a hideous
Victorian imitation of seventeenth century Breton architecture, which flaunts its
(31:29):
stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill,
and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple
in America. I found him at work in his rooms,
and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that
his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe,
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sometime be heard from as one of the great decadentes,
for he is crystallized in clay, and will one day
mirror in my marble those nightmares and fantasies which Arthur
Makon evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible
in verse and in painting. Dark, frail and somewhat unkempt
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an aspect. He turned languidly at my knock and asked
me my business without rising. When I told him who
I was, he displayed some interest, for my uncle had
excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had
never explained the reason for the study. I did not
enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some
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subtlety to draw him out, And a short time I
became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of
the dreams in a manner none could mistake they and
their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly. And he
showed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me
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shake with the pope, and see its black suggestion. He
could not recall having seen the original of this thing,
except in his own dream bar relief, but the outlines
had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was no
doubt the giant shape he'd raved of in delirium that
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he really knew nothing of the Hidden Cult, save from
what my uncle's relentless catechism had let fall. He soon
made clear, and again I strove to think of some
way in which he could possibly have received the weird
impressions he talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion,
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making me see with terrible vividness, the damp cyclopaean city
of slimy green Stone, whose geometry he oddly said, was
all wrong, and here, with frightened expectancy, the ceaseless half
mental calling from underground kuth Huluf Cthulhu photoggon. These words
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had formed part of that dread ritual which told of
that Cthulhu's dream vigil and his stone vault at Biliah,
and I felt deeply moved. Despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox,
I was sure, had heard of the cult in some
casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass
(34:27):
of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue
of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression and
dreams in the ba relief, and in the terrible statue
I now beheld, So that his imposture upon my uncle
had been a very innocent one. The youth was of
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a type at once slightly affected and slightly ill mannered,
which I could never like. But I was willing enough
now to add. Amid both his genius and his honesty,
I took leave of him amicably and wished him all
the success as talent promises. The matter of the cult
(35:14):
still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had
visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connections.
I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of
that old time rating party, saw the Frightful image, and
even questioned much of the Mongrel prisoners as still survived.
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Old Castro unfortunately had been dead for some years, but
I now heard so graphically at first hand, though it
was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what
my uncle had written, excited me afresh, for I felt
sure that I was on the track of a very real,
very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make
(36:00):
me an anthropologist. Of note, my attitude was still one
of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and
I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the
dream notes and the ought cuttings collected by Professor Angel.
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One thing I began to suspect, in which now I
fear I know, is that my uncle's death was far
from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading
up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels after
a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not
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forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult
members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn
of secret methods and rights and beliefs. The Grass and
his men, it is true, have been let alone. But
in Norway a certain seamen who saw things as dead
(37:04):
might not. The deeper inquiries of my uncle, after encountering
the Sculptor's data, have come to sinister ears. I think
Professor Angel died because he knew too much, or because
he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall
go as he did remains to be seen, For I
(37:26):
have learned much now. End of Chapter two
Chapter two of the Call of Cthulhu by H. Pel
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, Chapter two,
(00:26):
the Tale of Inspector le Grasse. The older matters which
had made the sculptor's dream and bar relief so significant
to my uncle, formed the subject of the second half
of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell
had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled
(00:49):
over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which
can be rendered only as Cthulhu. And all this and
so stirring at horror, a connection that at a small
wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in nineteen o eight, seventeen
(01:11):
years before, when the American Archeological Society held its annual
meeting in Saint Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of
his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in
all the deliberations and was one of the first to
be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of
(01:32):
the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems
for expert solution. The chief of these outsiders, and in
a short time, the focus of interest for the entire meeting,
was a commonplace looking middle aged man who had traveled
all the way from New Orleans for certain special information
(01:54):
unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond
le Grat, and he was by profession and a specter
of police.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
With him. He bore the subject of his visit a grotesque, repulsive,
and apparently very ancient stone statuette, whose origin he was
at a loss to determine. It was not to be
fancied that Inspector le Grasse had the least interest in archaeology.
On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by
(02:25):
purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was,
had been captured some months before in the wooded swamp
south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed
voodoo meeting, and so singular and hideous were the rites
connected with it that the police could not but realize
(02:47):
that they had stumbled on a dark cult, totally unknown
to them and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest
of the African voodoo circles of its origin. Apart from
the year erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members,
absolutely nothing was to be discovered, hence the anxiety of
(03:09):
the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them
place the frightful symbol and through it tracked down the
cult to its fountain head. As specter Legrasse was scarcely
prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight
of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled
men of science into a state of tense excitement, and
(03:32):
they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze
at the diminutive figure, whose utter strangeness and air of
genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently it unopened and archaic vistas.
No recognized school of sculpture had animated this terrible object,
(03:53):
yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in
its dim and greener surface of a playable stone. The figure,
which was finally passed slowly from man to man for
close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches
in height and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a
(04:16):
monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus like
head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly,
rubbery looking body, prodigious claws on hind and four feet
and long narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct
(04:37):
with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat
bloated corpulence and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings
touched the back edge of the block. The seat occupied
the center, whilst the long curved claws of the doubled
(05:00):
up crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended
a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of
the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward so that
the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of
huge forepaws, which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect
(05:20):
of the whole was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly
fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast,
awesome and incalculable age was unmistakable, Yet not one link
did it show with any known type of art belonging
to civilization's youth, or indeed to any other time. Totally
(05:44):
separate and apart, its very material was a mystery for
the soapy, greenish black stone, with its golden or iridescent
flex and striations, resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.
The characters along the base were equally baffling, and no
(06:04):
member present, despite a representation of half the world's expert
learning in this field, could form the least notion of
even their remotest linguistic kinship. They like, the subject and
material belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind
as we know it, something frightfully suggestive of old and
(06:27):
unhallow cycles of life in which our world and our
conceptions have no part. And yet, as the members severally
shook their heads and confessed to feat at the inspector's problem,
there was one man in that gathering who suspected a
touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing,
(06:49):
and who presently told with some diffidence of the art
trifle he knew this person was the late William Channing Webb,
Professor of Anthropology and Princeton University, and an explorer of
no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged forty eight
years before in a tour of Greenland at Iceland in
(07:11):
search of some runic inscriptions, which he failed to unearth,
and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast, had
encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos, whose religion,
a curious form of devil worship, chilled him with its
deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
(07:33):
other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shutters,
saying that it had come down from horribly ancient AONs
before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rights and
human sacrifices, there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to
a supreme elder devil or tornassuk, and of this Professor
(07:56):
Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged
Ankakok or wizard priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters,
as best he knew how, But just now of prime
significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished and
around which they had danced when the Aurora leaped high
(08:16):
over the ice cliffs. It was, the Professor stated, a
very crude bar relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture
of some cryptic writing, and so far as he could tell,
it was a rough parallel in all essential features of
the bestial thing now lying before the meeting. This data,
(08:38):
received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved
doubly exciting to Inspector le Grasse, and he began at
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and
copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult worshipers his
men had arrested, he besought the Professor to remember, as
(08:59):
best team mane the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos.
There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a
moment of really odd silence, when both detective and scientists
agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to
two Hellish rituals. So many worlds of distance apart, what
(09:22):
in substance both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp
priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very
like this, The word divisions being guessed at from traditional
breaks in the phrases chanted aloud ghluy manafkthl lea knaglftan
(09:46):
the grass had one point in advance of Professor Webb,
for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him
what older celebrants had told them. The words meant. This text,
as given, ran something like this in his house at Realia,
dead Cuthulhu waits dreaming, And now, in response to a
(10:12):
general and urgent demand, Inspector Lagrass related as fully as
possible his experience with the swamp worshippers, telling a story
to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance.
It savored of the wildest dreams of mythmaker and theosophist,
and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such
(10:36):
half castes and pariahs as might be least expected to
possess it. On November one, nineteen oh seven, there had
come to the New Orleans Police a frantic summons from
the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatter's there,
(10:56):
mostly primitive but good natured descendants of fit Its men
were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown
thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It
was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort
than they had ever known, and some of their women
and children had disappeared since the malevolent Tom Tom had
(11:18):
begun its incessant beating. Far within the black haunted woods
were no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams,
soul chilling chants, and dancing devil flames, and the frightened
messenger added that people could stand it no more so.
(11:41):
A body of twenty police filling two carriages and an
automobile had set out in the late afternoon with a
shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the
passable road, they alighted, and for miles splashed on in
silence through the terrible cypress woods were never came. Ugly
(12:02):
roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them,
And now and then a pile of dank stones of
fragment of a rotting wall, intensified by its hint of
morbid habitation, a depression which every male formed tree and
every fungus islet combined to create at length the squatter settlement,
(12:27):
a miserable huddle of huts hove in sight, and hysterical
dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns.
The muffled beat of Tom Tom's was now faintly audible
far far ahead, and a curdling shriek came at infrequent
(12:47):
intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare two seemed
to filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of
forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each
one of the Count's squatters refused point blank to advance
another inch toward the scene of unholy worship. So Inspector
(13:11):
la Grasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on, unguided, into
black arcades of horror that none of them had ever
trod before. The region now entered by the police was
one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by
white men. There were legends of a hidden lake, unglimpsed
(13:34):
by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless, white
polypus thing with luminous eyes, and squatters whispered that bat
winged devils flew up out of caverns and inner earth
to worship it at midnight. They said it had been
there before Deberville, before LaSalle, before the Indians, and before
(13:58):
even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It
was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die.
But it made men dream, and so they knew enough
to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was indeed on
the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location
(14:22):
was bad enough. Hence, perhaps the very place of the
worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds
and incidents. Only poetry or madness could do justice to
the noises heard by the Grass's men as they plowed
on through the black morass toward the red glare and
(14:44):
muffled tom toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men,
and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts, and it is terrible
to hear the one when the sore should yield the other.
Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniak
(15:05):
heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated
through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs
of Hell. Now and then the less organized udulation would cease,
and from what seemed a well drilled chorus of hoarse
voices would rise and singh song, chant that hideous phrase
(15:29):
or ritual glory um da kathuru Releier Macnagle photogon. Then
the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner,
came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of
them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a
(15:53):
frantic cry, which the matt cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened.
The grass dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy
(16:13):
island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and
tolerably dry. On this now leaked and twisted a more
indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a syme
or an anger rolla could paint void of clothing. This
(16:34):
hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous
ring shaped bonfire, in the center of which, revealed by
occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great
granite monolith some eight feet in height, on top of which,
(16:55):
incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carvage statuette. From
a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular
intervals with the flame girt monolith as a center, hung
head downward the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters
(17:17):
who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the
ring of worshipers jumped and roared, the general direction of
the mass motion being from left to right, an endless back,
and all between the ring of bodies and the ring
of fire. It may have been only imagination, that it
(17:40):
may have been only echoes, which induced one of the men,
an excitable Spaniard, to fancy herd antiphonal responses to the ritual.
From some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood
of ancient legendary and horror, This man, Joseph D. Galvez I,
laid her and questioned, and he proved distractingly imaginative. He
(18:05):
indeed went so far as to hint of the faint
beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining
eyes in the mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees.
But I suppose he'd been hearing too much native superstition. Actually,
the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration.
(18:27):
Duty came first, and although there must have been nearly
one hundred mongrels celebrants in the throng, the police relied
on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseest route
for five minutes. The resultant din and chaos were beyond description.
Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made.
(18:51):
But in the end the Grass was able to count
some forty seven sellen prisoners, whom he forced to dress
in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen.
Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded
ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow prisoners.
(19:12):
The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed
and carried back by the grass. Examined at headquarters after
a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all
proved to be men of a very low, mixed blooded,
and mentally aberrent type. Most were Seamen, and a sprinkling
(19:34):
of Negroes and Mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese
from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a coloring of voodooism
to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked,
it became manifest that something far deeper and older than
Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were,
(20:00):
the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea
of their loathsome faith they worshiped, so they said, the
great old ones, who lived ages before there were any men,
and who came to the young world out of the sky.
Those old ones were gone now inside the earth and
(20:22):
under the sea. But their dead bodies had told their
secrets and dreams to the first men, who formed a
cult which had never died. This was that cult, and
the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist,
hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the
(20:43):
world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from
his dark house in the mighty city of Reliah under
the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call when the stars
were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting
(21:07):
to liberate him. Meanwhile, no more must be told. There
was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind
was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth.
For shapes came out of the dark to visit the
(21:28):
faithful few. But these were not the great old ones.
No man had ever seen the old ones. The carven
Idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or
not the others were precisely like him. No one could
read the old writing now, but things were told by
(21:51):
word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret
that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant
only this. In his house at Uliah, dead Kathulhu waits dreaming.
(22:12):
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to
be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.
All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred
that the killing had been done by black winged ones
which had come to them from their immemorial meeting place
in the Haunted Wood. But of those mysterious allies, no
(22:37):
coherent account could ever be gained. But the police did
extract came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro,
who claimed to have sailed to the strange ports and
talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains
of China. Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that
(22:59):
paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the
world seem recent and transient. Indeed, there had been AONs
when other things ruled on the earth, and they had
had great cities. Remains of them, he said, The deathless
Chinamen had told him were still to be found Encyclopean
(23:22):
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast
epochs of time before men came, but there were arts
which could revive them when the stars had come around
again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity.
They had indeed come themselves from the stars and brought
(23:45):
their images with them. These great old ones, Castro continued,
were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape,
for did not the starfash image prove it, But that
shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right,
(24:06):
they could plunge from world to whirl through the sky.
But when the stars were wrong, they could not live.
But although they no longer lived, they would never really die.
They all lay in stone houses in their great city
of Ralie, preserved by the spells of mighty Kuthuhu, for
(24:28):
a glorious resurrection, when the stars and the earth might
once more be.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Ready for them.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
But at that time some force from outside must serve
to liberate their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact
likewise prevented them from making an initial move, and they
could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst
uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that
(24:58):
was occurring in the universe, for their mode of speech
was transmitted thought. Even now they talked in their tombs.
When after infinities of chaos the first men came, the
great old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by
molding their dreams, for only thus could their language reach
(25:21):
the fleshly minds of mammals. Then whispered Castro. Those first
men formed the cult around tall idols which the Great
Ones showed them, idols brought in dim eras from dark stars.
That cult would never die till the stars came right again,
(25:44):
and the secret priests would take Great Cathulu from his
tomb to revive his subjects and resume his rule of earth.
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind
would have become as the Great Old Ones, free and
wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals
(26:07):
thrown aside, and all men shouting and killing and reveling
in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them
new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves,
and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of
ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile, the cult, by appropriate rites, must
(26:31):
keep alive the memory of those ancient ways in shadow
for the prophecy of their return. In the elder times,
chosen men had talked with the entombed old Ones and dreams.
But then something happened. The great stone city, Realia, with
its monoliths and sepulchers, had sunk beneath the waves and
(26:56):
the deep waters full of the one Prime walan mystery
through which not even thought can pass, had cut off
the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high
priests said that the city would rise again when the
stars were right. Then came out of the earth, the
(27:19):
black spirits of earth, moldy and shadowy and full of
dim rumors, picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea bottoms.
But of them Old Castro dared not speak much. He
cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of
(27:43):
the old ones too, he curiously declined to mention of
the cult. He said that he thought the center lay
amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where erem the city
of pillars, dreams, hidden and untouched. It was not a
lie to the European which cult and was virtually unknown
(28:05):
beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it.
Though the Deathless Chinaman said that there were double meanings
in the necronomicon of the mad Arab abdul Alhazread, which
the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much
discussed couplet that is not dead, which can eternal lie
(28:29):
and with strange AONs even death may die. The Grass,
deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in
vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro apparently
had told the truth when he said that it was
wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no
(28:53):
light upon either cult or image. And now the detective
had come to the highest authority in the country and
met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by La Grasse's tale,
corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in
(29:15):
the subsequent correspondence of those who attended. Although scant mention
occurs in the formal publications of society, caution is the
first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanrie and imposture.
The Grass, for some time lent the image to Professor Webb,
(29:35):
but at the latter's death that was returned to him
and remains in his possession. Where I viewed it not
long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably
akin to the dream sculpture of young Wilcox that my
uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor. I
did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing
(29:58):
after a knowledge of what the had learned of the
cult of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not
only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the Swamp Found
Image and the Greenland Double Tablet, but had come in
his dreams upon at least three of the precise words
of the formula, uttered alike by Eskimo, Diabolists and Mongrel Louisianas.
(30:21):
Professor Angell's instant start on an investigation of the utmost
thoroughness was eminently natural, though privately I suspected young Wilcox
of having heard of the cult in some indirect way,
of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and
continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream narratives
(30:43):
and cuttings collected by the Professor were of course strong corroboration,
but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of
the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought
the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the man
his script again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes
(31:04):
with the cult narrative of La Grasse. I made a
trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him
the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon
a learned and aged man. Willcox still lived alone in
the Fleur de Lee building in Thomas Street, a hideous
Victorian imitation of seventeenth century Breton architecture, which flaunts its
(31:29):
stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill,
and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple
in America. I found him at work in his rooms,
and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that
his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe,
(31:52):
sometime be heard from as one of the great decadentes,
for he is crystallized in clay, and will one day
mirror in my marble those nightmares and fantasies which Arthur
Makon evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible
in verse and in painting. Dark, frail and somewhat unkempt
(32:14):
an aspect. He turned languidly at my knock and asked
me my business without rising. When I told him who
I was, he displayed some interest, for my uncle had
excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had
never explained the reason for the study. I did not
enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some
(32:38):
subtlety to draw him out, And a short time I
became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of
the dreams in a manner none could mistake they and
their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly. And he
showed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me
(32:58):
shake with the pope, and see its black suggestion. He
could not recall having seen the original of this thing,
except in his own dream bar relief, but the outlines
had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was no
doubt the giant shape he'd raved of in delirium that
(33:19):
he really knew nothing of the Hidden Cult, save from
what my uncle's relentless catechism had let fall. He soon
made clear, and again I strove to think of some
way in which he could possibly have received the weird
impressions he talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion,
(33:40):
making me see with terrible vividness, the damp cyclopaean city
of slimy green Stone, whose geometry he oddly said, was
all wrong, and here, with frightened expectancy, the ceaseless half
mental calling from underground kuth Huluf Cthulhu photoggon. These words
(34:06):
had formed part of that dread ritual which told of
that Cthulhu's dream vigil and his stone vault at Biliah,
and I felt deeply moved. Despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox,
I was sure, had heard of the cult in some
casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass
(34:27):
of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue
of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression and
dreams in the ba relief, and in the terrible statue
I now beheld, So that his imposture upon my uncle
had been a very innocent one. The youth was of
(34:51):
a type at once slightly affected and slightly ill mannered,
which I could never like. But I was willing enough
now to add. Amid both his genius and his honesty,
I took leave of him amicably and wished him all
the success as talent promises. The matter of the cult
(35:14):
still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had
visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connections.
I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of
that old time rating party, saw the Frightful image, and
even questioned much of the Mongrel prisoners as still survived.
(35:36):
Old Castro unfortunately had been dead for some years, but
I now heard so graphically at first hand, though it
was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what
my uncle had written, excited me afresh, for I felt
sure that I was on the track of a very real,
very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make
(36:00):
me an anthropologist. Of note, my attitude was still one
of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and
I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the
dream notes and the ought cuttings collected by Professor Angel.
(36:20):
One thing I began to suspect, in which now I
fear I know, is that my uncle's death was far
from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading
up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels after
a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not
(36:42):
forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult
members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn
of secret methods and rights and beliefs. The Grass and
his men, it is true, have been let alone. But
in Norway a certain seamen who saw things as dead
(37:04):
might not. The deeper inquiries of my uncle, after encountering
the Sculptor's data, have come to sinister ears. I think
Professor Angel died because he knew too much, or because
he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall
go as he did remains to be seen, For I
(37:26):
have learned much now. End of Chapter two
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