The Call of Cthulhu

by H.P. Lovecraft

It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.

He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy;

and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.

It represented a 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 fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

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 unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness.

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames;

They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods.

It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die.

Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened.

But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved.

???

They worshipped, 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.

There was a secret which even torture could not extract.

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture.

a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu.

If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind's soul.

they vowed that the world held no rock like it.

"They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them."

In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

flapping membraneous wings.

Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two 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, such eldritch contradictions o...

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.

an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.

There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper.

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 poison to me.

As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall 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 hi...

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.