August 21, 2025 • 33 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 three of The Call of Cuthulhu 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 three,
(00:27):
The Madness from the Sea. If Heaven ever wishes to
grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing
of the results of a mere chance which fixed my
eye on a certain stray piece of shell paper. It
was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in
(00:48):
the course of my daily round, for it was an
old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for
April eighteenth, nineteen twenty five. It had escaped even Thetting Bureau,
which had, at the time of its issuance been avidly
collecting material for my uncle's research. I had largely given
(01:09):
over my inquiries into what Professor Angel called the Cuthulhu cult,
and was visiting a learned friend in Patterson, New Jersey,
a curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of
note examining. One day the reserve specimens roughly set on
the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum,
(01:29):
my eye was caught by an odd picture in one
of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was
the Sydney bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend had
wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts, and the picture
was a half tone cut of a hideous stone image,
almost identical with that which Le Grasse had found in
(01:51):
the swamp. Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents,
I scanned the item in detail and was disappointed to
find it of only moderate length. What is suggested, however,
was a portentious significance to my flagging quest, and I
carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as
(02:14):
follows mystery derelict found at sea. Vigilant arrives with helpless
armed New Zealand yacht and tow one survivor and dead
man found aboard. Tale of desperate battle and deaths at sea.
Rescued Sieman refuses particulars of strange experience odd idol found
(02:37):
in his possession. Inquiry to follow. The Morris and Companies
freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at a
s wharf in Darling Harbor, having in tow the battled
and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin,
New Zealand, which was cited April twelfth in south latitude
(03:01):
thirty four degrees twenty one minutes west longitude one hundred
and fifty two degrees seventeen minutes, with one living and
one dead man aboard. The vigilant left Valparaizo March twenty fifth,
and on April second was driven considerably south of her
course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April twelfth,
(03:25):
the derelict was sighted, and, though apparently deserted, was found
upon boarding to contain one survivor at a half delirious condition,
and one man who had evidently been dead for more
than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible
stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height,
(03:47):
regarding whose nature. Authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society,
and the Museum in College Street all professed complete bafflement,
and which the survivor says he found in the cabin
of the yacht in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange
(04:09):
story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gusta F. Johanssen,
a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate
of the two masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed
for Callao February twentieth with a compliment of eleven men.
The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south
(04:31):
of her course by the great storm of March first
and on March twenty second, and south latitude forty nine
degrees fifty one minutes west longitude one hundred and twenty
eight degrees thirty four minutes encountered the alert, manned by
a queer and evil looking crew of canacus and half castes,
(04:52):
Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Captain Collins refused, whereupon
the strange crew began to fires savagely and without warning,
upon the schooner, with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment. The Emma's men
showed fights, ays the survivor, and though the schooner began
(05:14):
to sink from shots beneath the water line, they managed
to heave alongside their enemy and board her grappling with
the savage crew on the yacht's deck and being forced
to kill them all, the number being slightly superior because
of their particularly abhorrent and desperate, though rather clumsy mode
of fighting. Three of the Emma's men, including Captain Collins
(05:39):
and first mate Green, were killed, and the remaining eight,
under second mate Johanssen, proceeded to navigate the captured yacht,
going ahead in their original direction, to see if any
reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day,
it appears they raised and landed on a small island,
(05:59):
although none is known to exist in that part of
the ocean, and six of the men, some somehow died ashore,
though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of the
story and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later,
it seems he and one companion boarded the yacht and
tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the
(06:22):
storm of April second. From that time till his rescue
on the twelfth, the man remembers little, and he does
not even recall when William Brighton, his companion, died. Brighton's
death reveals no apparent cause and was probably due to
excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the
(06:44):
Alert was well known there as an island trader and
bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned
by a curious group of half castes, whose frequent meetings
and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity,
and it had set sail in great haste just after
the storm and earth tremors of March first. Our Auckland
(07:09):
correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation,
and Johanson is described with a sober and worthy man.
The Admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter,
beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to
induce Johanson to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
(07:31):
This was all together with a picture of the hellish image.
But what a train of ideas that started in my mind.
Here were new treasuries of data on the Cuthulhu cult
and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as
well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew
(07:52):
to order back the Emma as they sailed about with
their hideous idol. What was the unknown island on which
six of the Emma's crew had died, and about which
the mate Johansen was so secretive. What had the Vice
Admiralty's investigation brought out? And what was known of the
noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvelous of all, what
(08:16):
deep and more the natural linkage of dates was this
which gave him a line and now undeniable significance to
the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle.
March first or February twenty eighth, according to the international
date line, the earthquake and storm had come from Dunedin.
(08:39):
The Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth,
as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of
the earth, poets and artists had begun to dream of
a strange, dank Cyclopean city, whilst a young sculptor had
molded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu.
(09:00):
March twenty third, the crew of the Emma landed on
an unknown island and left six men dead. And on
that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened
vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit,
whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had
lapsed suddenly into delirium. And what of the strange storm
(09:25):
of April second, the date on which all dreams of
the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the
bondage of strange fever. What of all this, and of
those hints of Old Castro, about the sunken, star born
old ones and their coming reign, their faithful cult, and
(09:46):
their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink
of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so
they must be horrors of the mind alone, were in
some way the second of April had put a stop
to whatever monstrous menace had begun at siege of Bankind's soul.
(10:08):
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging,
I bade my host adieu and took a train for
San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin, where, however,
I found that little was known of the strange cult
members who had lingered in the old Sea taverns, Waterfront's
(10:28):
coumel was far too common for special mention, though there
was a vague talk about when inland trip those mongrels
had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were
noted on the distant hills in Auckland. I learned that
Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a
(10:49):
perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold
his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife
to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience,
he would tell his friends no more than he had
told the Admiralty officials, and all they could do was
to give me his Oslo address. After that, I went
(11:13):
to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of
the Vice Admiralty Court. I saw the Alert, now sold
and in commercial use at Circular Key in Sydney Cove,
but gained nothing from its noncommittal bulk. The crouching image,
with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings and hieroglyphic pedestal,
(11:38):
was preserved in the museum at Hyde Park, and I
studied it long and well, finding it a thing of
balefully exquisite workmanship and with the same utter mystery, terrible
antiquity and unearthly strangeness of material, which I had noted
on the Grass's smaller specimen geologists, the curator told me,
(12:00):
had founded a monstrous puzzle, for they vowed that the
world held no rock like it. That I thought, with
a shudder, of what old Castro had told the Grass
about the old ones. They had come from the stars
and had brought their images with them. Shaken with such
(12:20):
a mental resolution as I had never before known, I
now resolved to visit Mate Johanssen an Oslo. Sailing for London,
I re embarked at once for the Norwegian capital, and
one autumn day landed at the Trim wharves in the
shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen's address I discovered lay in
(12:42):
the old town of King Harold Hardrada, which kept alive
the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the
greater city masqueraded as Christiana. I made the brief trip
by taxicab and knocked with palpitant heart at the door
of a neat an ancient building with plastered front. A
(13:04):
sad faced woman in black answered my summons, and I
was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting
English that Gustav Johanssen was no more. He had not
long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings
at sea in nineteen twenty five had broken him. He
(13:25):
had told her no more than he told the public,
but had left a long manuscript of technical matters, as
he said, written in English, evidently in order to guard
her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk
through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg Dock, a bundle
of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down.
(13:50):
Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet,
but before the ambulance could reach him, he was dead.
Physicians found no I had a quick cause of the end,
and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals, that dark terror
which will never leave me till I too am at rest,
(14:14):
accidentally or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with
her husband's technical matters was sufficient to entitle me to
his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to
read it on the London boat. It was a simple
rambling thing, a naive sailor's effort at a post facto diary,
(14:39):
and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage.
I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim and all its
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell it's just enough
to show why the sound of water against the vessel's
sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my
(14:59):
ear with cotton. Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all,
even though he saw the city and the thing. But
I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of
the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life and time and
in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars
(15:23):
which dreamed beneath the sea, known and favored by nightmare cult,
ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever
another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to
the sun and air. Johans's voyage had begun, just as
(15:44):
he told it to the Vice Admiralty. The emma in
ballast had cleared Auckland on February twentieth, and had felt
the full force of that earthquake born tempest, which must
have heaved up from the sea bottom, the horror that
filled men's dreams. Once more under control, the ship was
(16:05):
making good progress when held up by the alert on
March twenty second, and I could feel the maid's regret
as she wrote of her bombardment and sinking of the
swarthy colt Fiends on the alert. He speaks with significant horror.
There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them, which made
(16:25):
their destruction seem almost a duty. And Johansen shows ingenuous
wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party
during the proceedings of the Court of Inquiry. Then driven
ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command.
The men's sight a great stone pillar sticking out of
(16:47):
the sea, and in south latitude forty seven degrees nine
minutes west longitude one hundred and twenty three degrees forty
three minutes, come upon a coastline of ming, gold, mud ooze,
and weedy Cyclopean masonry, which can be nothing less than
the tangible substance of Earth's supreme terror, The nightmare corpse
(17:11):
city of Relieh that was built in measureless AONs behind
history by the vast loathsome shapes that seeped down from
the dark stars. There lay Great Casulu and his hordes,
hidden in Green's slimeyvaults, and sending out at last, after
(17:33):
cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams
of the sensitive, and called imperiously to the faithful to
come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this
Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough.
(17:55):
I suppose that only a single mountaintop, the hideous monolith
Crown Citadel, where wrong Great Cathulhu was buried, actually emerged
from the waters. When I think of the extent of
all that may be brooding down there, I almost wish
to kill myself. Forthwith, Johansen and his men were awed
(18:17):
by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder demons,
and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing
of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying
height of the great carbon monolith, and the stupefying identity
(18:41):
of the colossal statues and bar releafs with the queer
image found in the shrine on the alert is poignantly
visible in every line of the mate's frightened description. Without
knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close
(19:01):
to it when he spoke of the city, for instead
of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only
on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces. Surface
is too great to belong to anything right or proper
for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs.
(19:27):
I mentioned this talk about angles because it suggests something
Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said
that the geometry of the dream place he saw was abnormal,
non Euclidean, and a loathsome reretolent of spheres and dimensions
apart from ours. Now, an unlettered seaman felt the same
(19:49):
thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality. Johansen and his
men landed on a sloping mud bank on this monstrous
acropolis and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which
could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of
Heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling
(20:13):
out from the Seasoak. Perversion and twisted menace and suspense
lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carbon rock,
where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers
(20:35):
before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed
was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared
the scorn of the others, and it was only half
heartedly that they searched vainly as it proved, for some
portable souvenir to bear away. It was Rodriguez, the Portuguese,
(20:57):
who climbed up the foot of the Monolithic and shouted
of what he'd found. The rest followed him and looked
curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar
squid dragon bar relief. It was, Johansen said, like a
great barre door, and they all felt that it was
a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold and jambs
(21:21):
around it, although they could not decide whether it lay
flat like a trapdoor or slatwise like an outside cellar door.
As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place
was all wrong. One could not be sure that the
sea and the ground were horizontal. Hence the relative position
(21:41):
of everything else seemed phantasmally variable. Brydon pushed at the
stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over
it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as
he went. He climbed and termined along the grotesque stone,
(22:02):
molding that as one would call the climbing if the
thing was not after all horizontal, And the men wondered
how any door in the universe could be so vast.
Then very softly and slowly, the acre great lintel began
to give inward at the top, and they saw that
(22:25):
it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down
or along the jam, and rejoined his fellows, and everyone
watched the queer recession of the monstrously carbon portal. In
this fantasy of prismatic distortion, it moved anomalously in a
(22:46):
diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and
perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black, with a darkness
almost material that t neeborousness was in the depositive quality,
for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as
ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like
(23:09):
smoke from its aon long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun
as it slunk away into the shrunkening gibbous sky, on
flapping membranous wings. The odor rising from the newly opened
depths was intolerable, and at length the quick eared Hawkins
thought he heard a nasty slopping sound down there. Everyone listened,
(23:35):
and everyone was listening still when it lumbered, slobberingling into
sight and gropingly squeezed its gelatinous green immensity through the
black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison
city of madness. For Johans's handwriting almost gave out when
(23:58):
he wrote of this. Of the six men who never
reached the ship, he thinks too perished of pure fright
in that accursed instant. The thing cannot be described. There
is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy,
(24:19):
such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
A mountain walked or stumbled God what wonder that across
the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox
raved with fever. In that telepathic instant, the thing of
(24:40):
the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had
awake to claim his own. The stars were right again.
And what an age old cult had failed to do
by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident.
(25:01):
After vigentillions of years, Great Cathulhu was loose again and
ravening for delight. Three men were swept up by the
flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there
be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera
(25:25):
and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging
frenziedly over endless vistas of green crusted rock to the boat,
and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle
of masonry which shouldn't have been there, an angle which
was acute but behaved as if it were uptus. So
(25:47):
only Brydon and Johansen reached the boat and pulled desperately
for the alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the
slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite
the departure of all hands for the shore, and it
(26:10):
was the work of only a few moments of feverish
rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get
the alert underway. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that
indescribable scene, she began to turn the lethal waters whilst
on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not
(26:31):
of Earth, the titan thing from the stars slavered and
gibbered like Polyphemy, cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus, then,
bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cuthulhu slid greasily into
the water and began to pursue with vast wave raising
(26:52):
strokes of cosmic potency. Rydon looked back and went mad, laughing,
really is He kept all laughing at intervals till death
found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was
wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out yet, Knowing
(27:14):
that the thing could surely overtake the alert until steam
was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance, and
setting the engine for full speed ran lightning like on
deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying
and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam
(27:34):
mounted higher and higher, the brave Norwegian drove his vessel
head on against the pursuing jelly, which rose above the
unclean froth like the stern of a demon galleon the
awful squidthead with writhing feelers came nearly up to the
bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.
(27:57):
There was a bursting because of an exploding blow, and
slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, as stench as
of a thousand open graves, and a sound that the
chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant, the
ship was befouled by an acrodym blinding green cloud, and
(28:19):
then there was only a venomous seething the stern where
God in heaven the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky
spawn was nebulously recombining in his hateful original form, whilst
its distance widened every second as the alert gained impetus
(28:40):
from its mounting steam. And that was all After that
Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin that
attended to a few matters of food for himself in
the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try
to navigate to the first bold flight, for the reaction
(29:02):
had taken something out of his soul. Then came the
storm of April second, and a gathering of the clouds
about his consciousness. There was a sense of spectral furling
through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides, through reeling
(29:22):
universes on comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the
pit to the moon, and from the moon back again
to the pit, all enlivened by a cachanating chorus of
the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green bat winged
mocking imps of Tartarus. Out of that dream came rescue,
(29:48):
the Vigilant, the Vice Admiralty Court, the streets of Dunedin,
and the long voyage back home to the old house
by the Egeberg. He could not tell they would think
him mad. He would write of what he knew before
death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would
(30:11):
be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, And now I have
placed it in the tin box, beside the bar releaf
and the papers of Professor Angel. With it shall go
this record of mine, this test of my own sanity,
(30:34):
where it is pieced together that which I hope may
never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all
that the universe has to hold of horror, and even
the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must
ever afterward be poisoned to me. But I do not
think my life will belong as my uncle went, as
(30:58):
poor Johanssen went. So shall I go? I know too much,
And the cult still lives. Cthulhu still lives too, I
suppose again in that chasm of stone which has shielded
him since the sun was young, is the cursed city
(31:22):
is sunken once more, For the vigilance sailed over the
spot after the April storm. But his ministers on Earth
still bellow and prance and slay around idle cap monoliths
and lonely places. He must have been trapped by the
sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world
(31:46):
would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who
knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what
has sunk may rise. Oathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep,
and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A
(32:09):
time will come, but I must not and cannot think.
Let me pray that if I do not survive this manuscript,
my executors may put caution before audacity and see that
it meets no other eye. End of Chapter three, end
(32:42):
of the Call of Cuthulu I. H. P. Lovecraft
Chapter three of The Call of Cuthulhu 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 three,
(00:27):
The Madness from the Sea. If Heaven ever wishes to
grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing
of the results of a mere chance which fixed my
eye on a certain stray piece of shell paper. It
was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in
(00:48):
the course of my daily round, for it was an
old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for
April eighteenth, nineteen twenty five. It had escaped even Thetting Bureau,
which had, at the time of its issuance been avidly
collecting material for my uncle's research. I had largely given
(01:09):
over my inquiries into what Professor Angel called the Cuthulhu cult,
and was visiting a learned friend in Patterson, New Jersey,
a curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of
note examining. One day the reserve specimens roughly set on
the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum,
(01:29):
my eye was caught by an odd picture in one
of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was
the Sydney bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend had
wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts, and the picture
was a half tone cut of a hideous stone image,
almost identical with that which Le Grasse had found in
(01:51):
the swamp. Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents,
I scanned the item in detail and was disappointed to
find it of only moderate length. What is suggested, however,
was a portentious significance to my flagging quest, and I
carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as
(02:14):
follows mystery derelict found at sea. Vigilant arrives with helpless
armed New Zealand yacht and tow one survivor and dead
man found aboard. Tale of desperate battle and deaths at sea.
Rescued Sieman refuses particulars of strange experience odd idol found
(02:37):
in his possession. Inquiry to follow. The Morris and Companies
freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at a
s wharf in Darling Harbor, having in tow the battled
and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin,
New Zealand, which was cited April twelfth in south latitude
(03:01):
thirty four degrees twenty one minutes west longitude one hundred
and fifty two degrees seventeen minutes, with one living and
one dead man aboard. The vigilant left Valparaizo March twenty fifth,
and on April second was driven considerably south of her
course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April twelfth,
(03:25):
the derelict was sighted, and, though apparently deserted, was found
upon boarding to contain one survivor at a half delirious condition,
and one man who had evidently been dead for more
than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible
stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height,
(03:47):
regarding whose nature. Authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society,
and the Museum in College Street all professed complete bafflement,
and which the survivor says he found in the cabin
of the yacht in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange
(04:09):
story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gusta F. Johanssen,
a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate
of the two masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed
for Callao February twentieth with a compliment of eleven men.
The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south
(04:31):
of her course by the great storm of March first
and on March twenty second, and south latitude forty nine
degrees fifty one minutes west longitude one hundred and twenty
eight degrees thirty four minutes encountered the alert, manned by
a queer and evil looking crew of canacus and half castes,
(04:52):
Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Captain Collins refused, whereupon
the strange crew began to fires savagely and without warning,
upon the schooner, with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment. The Emma's men
showed fights, ays the survivor, and though the schooner began
(05:14):
to sink from shots beneath the water line, they managed
to heave alongside their enemy and board her grappling with
the savage crew on the yacht's deck and being forced
to kill them all, the number being slightly superior because
of their particularly abhorrent and desperate, though rather clumsy mode
of fighting. Three of the Emma's men, including Captain Collins
(05:39):
and first mate Green, were killed, and the remaining eight,
under second mate Johanssen, proceeded to navigate the captured yacht,
going ahead in their original direction, to see if any
reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day,
it appears they raised and landed on a small island,
(05:59):
although none is known to exist in that part of
the ocean, and six of the men, some somehow died ashore,
though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of the
story and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later,
it seems he and one companion boarded the yacht and
tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the
(06:22):
storm of April second. From that time till his rescue
on the twelfth, the man remembers little, and he does
not even recall when William Brighton, his companion, died. Brighton's
death reveals no apparent cause and was probably due to
excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the
(06:44):
Alert was well known there as an island trader and
bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned
by a curious group of half castes, whose frequent meetings
and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity,
and it had set sail in great haste just after
the storm and earth tremors of March first. Our Auckland
(07:09):
correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation,
and Johanson is described with a sober and worthy man.
The Admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter,
beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to
induce Johanson to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
(07:31):
This was all together with a picture of the hellish image.
But what a train of ideas that started in my mind.
Here were new treasuries of data on the Cuthulhu cult
and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as
well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew
(07:52):
to order back the Emma as they sailed about with
their hideous idol. What was the unknown island on which
six of the Emma's crew had died, and about which
the mate Johansen was so secretive. What had the Vice
Admiralty's investigation brought out? And what was known of the
noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvelous of all, what
(08:16):
deep and more the natural linkage of dates was this
which gave him a line and now undeniable significance to
the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle.
March first or February twenty eighth, according to the international
date line, the earthquake and storm had come from Dunedin.
(08:39):
The Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth,
as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of
the earth, poets and artists had begun to dream of
a strange, dank Cyclopean city, whilst a young sculptor had
molded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu.
(09:00):
March twenty third, the crew of the Emma landed on
an unknown island and left six men dead. And on
that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened
vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit,
whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had
lapsed suddenly into delirium. And what of the strange storm
(09:25):
of April second, the date on which all dreams of
the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the
bondage of strange fever. What of all this, and of
those hints of Old Castro, about the sunken, star born
old ones and their coming reign, their faithful cult, and
(09:46):
their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink
of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so
they must be horrors of the mind alone, were in
some way the second of April had put a stop
to whatever monstrous menace had begun at siege of Bankind's soul.
(10:08):
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging,
I bade my host adieu and took a train for
San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin, where, however,
I found that little was known of the strange cult
members who had lingered in the old Sea taverns, Waterfront's
(10:28):
coumel was far too common for special mention, though there
was a vague talk about when inland trip those mongrels
had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were
noted on the distant hills in Auckland. I learned that
Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a
(10:49):
perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold
his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife
to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience,
he would tell his friends no more than he had
told the Admiralty officials, and all they could do was
to give me his Oslo address. After that, I went
(11:13):
to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of
the Vice Admiralty Court. I saw the Alert, now sold
and in commercial use at Circular Key in Sydney Cove,
but gained nothing from its noncommittal bulk. The crouching image,
with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings and hieroglyphic pedestal,
(11:38):
was preserved in the museum at Hyde Park, and I
studied it long and well, finding it a thing of
balefully exquisite workmanship and with the same utter mystery, terrible
antiquity and unearthly strangeness of material, which I had noted
on the Grass's smaller specimen geologists, the curator told me,
(12:00):
had founded a monstrous puzzle, for they vowed that the
world held no rock like it. That I thought, with
a shudder, of what old Castro had told the Grass
about the old ones. They had come from the stars
and had brought their images with them. Shaken with such
(12:20):
a mental resolution as I had never before known, I
now resolved to visit Mate Johanssen an Oslo. Sailing for London,
I re embarked at once for the Norwegian capital, and
one autumn day landed at the Trim wharves in the
shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen's address I discovered lay in
(12:42):
the old town of King Harold Hardrada, which kept alive
the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the
greater city masqueraded as Christiana. I made the brief trip
by taxicab and knocked with palpitant heart at the door
of a neat an ancient building with plastered front. A
(13:04):
sad faced woman in black answered my summons, and I
was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting
English that Gustav Johanssen was no more. He had not
long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings
at sea in nineteen twenty five had broken him. He
(13:25):
had told her no more than he told the public,
but had left a long manuscript of technical matters, as
he said, written in English, evidently in order to guard
her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk
through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg Dock, a bundle
of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down.
(13:50):
Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet,
but before the ambulance could reach him, he was dead.
Physicians found no I had a quick cause of the end,
and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals, that dark terror
which will never leave me till I too am at rest,
(14:14):
accidentally or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with
her husband's technical matters was sufficient to entitle me to
his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to
read it on the London boat. It was a simple
rambling thing, a naive sailor's effort at a post facto diary,
(14:39):
and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage.
I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim and all its
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell it's just enough
to show why the sound of water against the vessel's
sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my
(14:59):
ear with cotton. Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all,
even though he saw the city and the thing. But
I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of
the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life and time and
in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars
(15:23):
which dreamed beneath the sea, known and favored by nightmare cult,
ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever
another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to
the sun and air. Johans's voyage had begun, just as
(15:44):
he told it to the Vice Admiralty. The emma in
ballast had cleared Auckland on February twentieth, and had felt
the full force of that earthquake born tempest, which must
have heaved up from the sea bottom, the horror that
filled men's dreams. Once more under control, the ship was
(16:05):
making good progress when held up by the alert on
March twenty second, and I could feel the maid's regret
as she wrote of her bombardment and sinking of the
swarthy colt Fiends on the alert. He speaks with significant horror.
There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them, which made
(16:25):
their destruction seem almost a duty. And Johansen shows ingenuous
wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party
during the proceedings of the Court of Inquiry. Then driven
ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command.
The men's sight a great stone pillar sticking out of
(16:47):
the sea, and in south latitude forty seven degrees nine
minutes west longitude one hundred and twenty three degrees forty
three minutes, come upon a coastline of ming, gold, mud ooze,
and weedy Cyclopean masonry, which can be nothing less than
the tangible substance of Earth's supreme terror, The nightmare corpse
(17:11):
city of Relieh that was built in measureless AONs behind
history by the vast loathsome shapes that seeped down from
the dark stars. There lay Great Casulu and his hordes,
hidden in Green's slimeyvaults, and sending out at last, after
(17:33):
cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams
of the sensitive, and called imperiously to the faithful to
come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this
Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough.
(17:55):
I suppose that only a single mountaintop, the hideous monolith
Crown Citadel, where wrong Great Cathulhu was buried, actually emerged
from the waters. When I think of the extent of
all that may be brooding down there, I almost wish
to kill myself. Forthwith, Johansen and his men were awed
(18:17):
by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder demons,
and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing
of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying
height of the great carbon monolith, and the stupefying identity
(18:41):
of the colossal statues and bar releafs with the queer
image found in the shrine on the alert is poignantly
visible in every line of the mate's frightened description. Without
knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close
(19:01):
to it when he spoke of the city, for instead
of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only
on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces. Surface
is too great to belong to anything right or proper
for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs.
(19:27):
I mentioned this talk about angles because it suggests something
Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said
that the geometry of the dream place he saw was abnormal,
non Euclidean, and a loathsome reretolent of spheres and dimensions
apart from ours. Now, an unlettered seaman felt the same
(19:49):
thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality. Johansen and his
men landed on a sloping mud bank on this monstrous
acropolis and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which
could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of
Heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling
(20:13):
out from the Seasoak. Perversion and twisted menace and suspense
lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carbon rock,
where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers
(20:35):
before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed
was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared
the scorn of the others, and it was only half
heartedly that they searched vainly as it proved, for some
portable souvenir to bear away. It was Rodriguez, the Portuguese,
(20:57):
who climbed up the foot of the Monolithic and shouted
of what he'd found. The rest followed him and looked
curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar
squid dragon bar relief. It was, Johansen said, like a
great barre door, and they all felt that it was
a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold and jambs
(21:21):
around it, although they could not decide whether it lay
flat like a trapdoor or slatwise like an outside cellar door.
As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place
was all wrong. One could not be sure that the
sea and the ground were horizontal. Hence the relative position
(21:41):
of everything else seemed phantasmally variable. Brydon pushed at the
stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over
it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as
he went. He climbed and termined along the grotesque stone,
(22:02):
molding that as one would call the climbing if the
thing was not after all horizontal, And the men wondered
how any door in the universe could be so vast.
Then very softly and slowly, the acre great lintel began
to give inward at the top, and they saw that
(22:25):
it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down
or along the jam, and rejoined his fellows, and everyone
watched the queer recession of the monstrously carbon portal. In
this fantasy of prismatic distortion, it moved anomalously in a
(22:46):
diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and
perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black, with a darkness
almost material that t neeborousness was in the depositive quality,
for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as
ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like
(23:09):
smoke from its aon long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun
as it slunk away into the shrunkening gibbous sky, on
flapping membranous wings. The odor rising from the newly opened
depths was intolerable, and at length the quick eared Hawkins
thought he heard a nasty slopping sound down there. Everyone listened,
(23:35):
and everyone was listening still when it lumbered, slobberingling into
sight and gropingly squeezed its gelatinous green immensity through the
black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison
city of madness. For Johans's handwriting almost gave out when
(23:58):
he wrote of this. Of the six men who never
reached the ship, he thinks too perished of pure fright
in that accursed instant. The thing cannot be described. There
is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy,
(24:19):
such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
A mountain walked or stumbled God what wonder that across
the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox
raved with fever. In that telepathic instant, the thing of
(24:40):
the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had
awake to claim his own. The stars were right again.
And what an age old cult had failed to do
by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident.
(25:01):
After vigentillions of years, Great Cathulhu was loose again and
ravening for delight. Three men were swept up by the
flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there
be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera
(25:25):
and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging
frenziedly over endless vistas of green crusted rock to the boat,
and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle
of masonry which shouldn't have been there, an angle which
was acute but behaved as if it were uptus. So
(25:47):
only Brydon and Johansen reached the boat and pulled desperately
for the alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the
slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite
the departure of all hands for the shore, and it
(26:10):
was the work of only a few moments of feverish
rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get
the alert underway. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that
indescribable scene, she began to turn the lethal waters whilst
on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not
(26:31):
of Earth, the titan thing from the stars slavered and
gibbered like Polyphemy, cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus, then,
bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cuthulhu slid greasily into
the water and began to pursue with vast wave raising
(26:52):
strokes of cosmic potency. Rydon looked back and went mad, laughing,
really is He kept all laughing at intervals till death
found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was
wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out yet, Knowing
(27:14):
that the thing could surely overtake the alert until steam
was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance, and
setting the engine for full speed ran lightning like on
deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying
and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam
(27:34):
mounted higher and higher, the brave Norwegian drove his vessel
head on against the pursuing jelly, which rose above the
unclean froth like the stern of a demon galleon the
awful squidthead with writhing feelers came nearly up to the
bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.
(27:57):
There was a bursting because of an exploding blow, and
slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, as stench as
of a thousand open graves, and a sound that the
chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant, the
ship was befouled by an acrodym blinding green cloud, and
(28:19):
then there was only a venomous seething the stern where
God in heaven the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky
spawn was nebulously recombining in his hateful original form, whilst
its distance widened every second as the alert gained impetus
(28:40):
from its mounting steam. And that was all After that
Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin that
attended to a few matters of food for himself in
the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try
to navigate to the first bold flight, for the reaction
(29:02):
had taken something out of his soul. Then came the
storm of April second, and a gathering of the clouds
about his consciousness. There was a sense of spectral furling
through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides, through reeling
(29:22):
universes on comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the
pit to the moon, and from the moon back again
to the pit, all enlivened by a cachanating chorus of
the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green bat winged
mocking imps of Tartarus. Out of that dream came rescue,
(29:48):
the Vigilant, the Vice Admiralty Court, the streets of Dunedin,
and the long voyage back home to the old house
by the Egeberg. He could not tell they would think
him mad. He would write of what he knew before
death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would
(30:11):
be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, And now I have
placed it in the tin box, beside the bar releaf
and the papers of Professor Angel. With it shall go
this record of mine, this test of my own sanity,
(30:34):
where it is pieced together that which I hope may
never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all
that the universe has to hold of horror, and even
the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must
ever afterward be poisoned to me. But I do not
think my life will belong as my uncle went, as
(30:58):
poor Johanssen went. So shall I go? I know too much,
And the cult still lives. Cthulhu still lives too, I
suppose again in that chasm of stone which has shielded
him since the sun was young, is the cursed city
(31:22):
is sunken once more, For the vigilance sailed over the
spot after the April storm. But his ministers on Earth
still bellow and prance and slay around idle cap monoliths
and lonely places. He must have been trapped by the
sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world
(31:46):
would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who
knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what
has sunk may rise. Oathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep,
and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A
(32:09):
time will come, but I must not and cannot think.
Let me pray that if I do not survive this manuscript,
my executors may put caution before audacity and see that
it meets no other eye. End of Chapter three, end
(32:42):
of the Call of Cuthulu I. H. P. Lovecraft
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