The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

by H.P. Lovecraft

His interest in the weird was fostered by his grandfather Phillips, who entertained Lovecraft with oral weird tales in the Gothic mode; but it was his ecstatic discovery of Edgar Allan Poe in 1898 that put the seal on the matter: “. . . at the age of eight I saw the blue firmanent of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!”

As a boy Lovecraft was somewhat lonely and suffered from frequent illnesses, many apparently psychological.

During this period Lovecraft was also thrown into an unhealthily close relationship with his mother, still suffering from the trauma of her husband’s illness and death, and who developed a pathological love-hate relationship with her son.

For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening void.

Lovecraft’s philosophical position virtually necessitated the central conception in his aesthetic of the weird—the notion of cosmicism, or the suggestion of the vast gulfs of space and time and the resultant inconsequence of the human species.

To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes.

These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism ) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

Lovecraft’s pseudomythology brutally shows that man is not the center of the universe, that the “gods” care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.

“The flight of imagination, and the delineation of pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose as in verse—often better. It is this lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me”

There may be those who banish all weird fiction into a kind of literary purgatory, but the achievements of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Ramsey Campbell are making this increasingly difficult to do.

Lovecraft’s fiction and “revisions” can be found in four volumes published by Arkham House (Sauk City, WI) under my editorship: The Dunwich Horror and Others (1984) At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (1985) Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1986) The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989)

The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish,2 and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain.

But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.

“YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn2 did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. No one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a memorial to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed object were found, which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit that he ever existed.

It shewed in his collection of trophies and specimens, which were not such as a normal man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared strikingly in the Oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife.

Though he did not inherit the madness which was feared by some, he was densely stupid and given to brief periods of uncontrollable violence. In frame he was small, but intensely powerful, and was of incredible agility.

It is hard to say just what he resembled, but his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a thrill of repulsion to those who met him for the first time.

He resembled a white gorilla.

For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son all three went away. Later the god and the princess had returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband had mummified the body and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was worshipped. Then he had departed alone. The legend here seemed to present three variants. According to one story nothing further happened save that the stuffed goddess became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It was for this reason that the N’bangus carried it off. A second story told of the god’s return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return of the son, grown to manhood—or ape-hood or godhood, as the case might be—yet unconscious of his identity.

What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighbouring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephaïs and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily forever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth8 the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.

Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget.

Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biassed me against places of this kind.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years—not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud.

This seems impossible

And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.

Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon.

Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs, West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation.

My supposition is that the patient was unconscious, not dead, and West suffocates him after neutralizing the sedative. Essentially, he has just murdered him.

Our alarm was now divided, for besides our fear of the unknown, 9 we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered.

happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes.

Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

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. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings;

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Legrasse 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 R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

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. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.

Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few.

They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die.

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

It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.

I somehow linked it with forgotten nightmares, and felt that I might go mad if I recognised it.

The voice of the man who was heard speaking with the things in the cave. He has the phonograph recording with him.

The bare, compact cerebral matter was then immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid with an ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes reaching through and connecting at will with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech.

One of them was linked at two of the sockets to a pair of singular-looking machines that stood in the background. Of their purport I did not need to be told, and I shivered as with ague.

I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim—Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name. —Nemesis.1