The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

by H.P. Lovecraft

The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the New-port boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside6

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.20

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men.

the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type.

Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

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

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,32 with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling 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.

He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence,

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