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One morning the wife of the coffee-house owner woke to find fourteen rabbits in her bed.
The place where I had been sitting had already been taken over by a colony of ants.
Lampenbogen’s country villa had become a porcupine warren and a well-fed python was sleeping on the sofa in his late lamented wife’s boudoir.
It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.
The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.
Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region.
When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures.
It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.
And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world.
‘I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region – not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind – where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with more expressions of the soul
the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows,
His body resembled the iridescent calyx of some gigantic flower, a mysterious plant from Indian primeval forests that someone had shyly laid at the altar of death.
The decay pulled apart the mouth of the dead man. He seemed to smile. He dreamed of beatific stars, of a fragrant summer evening. His rotting lips trembled as though under a brief kiss.
countless unrequited passions and unsatisfied longings and lurid flames of wild blazing pleasure raged within that palace, and that the curse of all the heart-aches and blasted hopes had made its every stone thirsty and hungry,
But on its surface I did indeed see two eyes, formed with wonderful precision – two very human eyes that seemed to stare out at me in an unpleasant and sinister way. I stepped back, utterly appalled by the sight.
The heaps of ruins thicker. Something inexpressibly desolate hovered over them; something reached from them that struck my heart like the touch of ghosts so old that they could be only the ghosts of ghosts. I went on.
Some ancient and wonderful civilization that had ruled when the Poles were tropical gardens?
Something infinitely malignant, infinitely horrible, infinitely ancient. It lurked, it brooded, it threatened and it – was invisible!
Think – alone in that place of strange light with the brooding ancient Horror above me – a monstrous Thing, a Thing unthinkable – an unseen Thing that poured forth horror –
Bodiless, inexplicable horror had me as in a net, whose strands, being intangible, without reason for existence,
Our eyes met and his seemed to light up with a vile gleaming, as if all the wickedness of his nature had come to a focus in the look of concentrated hate he gave me.
fascinated, on something that moved by the old man’s feet. It writhed there on the floor like a huge, repulsive starfish, an immense, armed, legged thing, that twisted convulsively. It was smooth, as if made of rubber, was whitish-green in color; and presently raised its great round blob of a body on tottering tentacles, crept toward my host and writhed upward – yes, climbed up his legs, his body. And he stood there, erect, arms folded, and stared sternly down at the thing which climbed.
Fatuously trustful as a month-old puppy, I had lived in a grim, evil world, where goodness is a word and crude selfishness the only
Drearily my thoughts drifted back through my own life, its futile purposes, mistakes and activities. All of evil that I knew returned to overwhelm me. Our gropings toward divinity were a sham, a writhing sunward of slime – covered beasts who claimed sunlight as their heritage, but in their hearts preferred the foul and easy depths.
Something vindictive resides in soot, something evil lurks there.
lights. They radiate force and friendliness, almost cheeriness. But by their very
Could it be that his sensitized brain and automatic fingers had continued to record impressions even after the end?
reason – though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers – is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England
The strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds.
there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears.
But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.
He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of unexplainable terror.
They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time.
It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.
The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard.
He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago.
Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course.
‘Bigger’n a barn… all made o’ squirmin’ ropes… hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything with dozens o’ legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step… nothin’ solid abaout it – all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together… great bulgin’ eyes all over it… ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin’ an openin’ an’ shuttin’… all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings… an’ Gawd in Heaven – that haff face on top…’
so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the
ear;
From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?
It appeared to be an account of some secret society whose activities and ritual were of a nature so obscure, and, when not, so vile and terrible, that Mr Corbett would not at first believe that this could be a record of any human mind, although his deep interest in it should have convinced him that from his humanity at least it was not altogether alien.
‘We’re probably on another plane of existence. You have some mathematical knowledge; it will help you to understand. Our three-dimensional world is probably lost to us, and I’ll define this one as the world of the Nth dimension, which is very vague. If, by some inconceivable magic or some monstrous science, we were transported to Mars or Jupiter, or even to Aldebaran, it wouldn’t prevent us from seeing the same constellations we see from earth.’
The great silent night had swallowed up our poor Walker forever.
‘You’re not mistaken,’ he said softly, ‘but for the love of Christ don’t say anything about it to the others. Their minds are already close enough to madness.’
Eighty people had vanished that night, some from their homes, others while they were on their way home!
The spot is evil – it is unholy in
a way that I simply can’t describe.
