Efficiunt Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint,
conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.
(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were
real.)
—Lactantius
I was far from
home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it
pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting
willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And
because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through
the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where
Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never
seen but often dreamed of.
It
was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it
is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the
Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had
dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where
also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that
the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people,
and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And
they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate
southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the
tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only
the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one
who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the
poor and the lonely remember.
Then
beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming;
snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and
chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless
labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central
peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and
scattered at all angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks; antiquity
hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights
and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion
and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the
secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.
Beside
the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I
saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through
the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road
was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as
of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in
1692, but I did not know just where.
As
the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of a
village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and
felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to
me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for
merriment or look for wayfarers, kept on down past the hushed lighted
farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea
taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared
doorways glistened along deserted unpaved lanes in the light of little,
curtained windows.
I
had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people. It was
told that I should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long; so I
hastened through Back Street to Circle Court, and across the fresh snow on the
one full flagstone pavement in the town, to where Green Lane leads off behind
the Market House. The old maps still held good, and I had no trouble; though at
Arkham they must have lied when they said the trolleys ran to this place, since
I saw not a wire overhead. Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was
glad I had chosen to walk, for the white village had seemed very beautiful from
the hill; and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people, the seventh
house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second
storey, all built before 1650.
There
were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from the diamond
window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its antique state. The
upper part overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly met the
over-hanging part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a tunnel, with
the low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk, but many
houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with iron railings. It
was an odd scene, and because I was strange to New England I had never known
its like before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there
had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few windows
without drawn curtains.
When
I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been
gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the
bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of
curious customs. And when my knock was answered I was fully afraid, because I
had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid
long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that
reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a quaint and
ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.
He
beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and dark,
stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there,
for not an attribute was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a
spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet
sat back toward me, silently spinning despite the festive season. An indefinite
dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be blazing.
The high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and
seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like everything about
what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger from
what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man's bland face
the more its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin
was too much like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a
fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially
on the tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the
place of the festival.
Pointing
to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I
sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they
included old Morryster's wild Marvels of Science, the terrible Saducismus
Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreja
of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin
translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous
things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of signs in
the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman continued
her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and the people
very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition of my fathers had
summoned me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer things. So I tried
to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that
accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or
consciousness, but I disliked it when I fancied I heard the closing of one of
the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had
seemed to follow a whirring that was not of the old woman's spinning-wheel.
This was not much, though, for the old woman was spinning very hard, and the
aged clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were
persons on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old
man came back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on
that very bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous waiting,
and the blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck,
however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive carved chest in a corner,
and got two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned, and the other of which he
draped round the old woman, who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they
both started for the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man,
after picking up the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his
hood over that unmoving face or mask.
We
went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient
town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one,
and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured
silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street and
that, past the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and
diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses
overlapped and crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards
where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.
Amid
these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows that
seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormally
pulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery
columns slithered, and I saw that all the travellers were converging as they
flowed near a sort of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the
centre of the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from the
road's crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me
shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment on the ghostly
spire.
There
was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with spectral shafts,
and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind, and lined
with unwholesomely archaic houses having peaked roofs and overhanging gables.
Death-fires danced over the tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly
failing to cast any shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were no houses, I
could see over the hill's summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbour,
though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a lantern
bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake the throng
that was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till the crowd had
oozed into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers had followed. The old
man was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determined to be the last. Crossing the
threshold into the swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look
at the outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on
the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though the wind had not
left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the door; and in that
fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they bore no mark of
passing feet, not even mine.
The
church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it, for most of
the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the
high pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just
before the pulpit, and were now squirming noiselessly in. I followed dumbly
down the foot-worn steps and into the dark, suffocating crypt. The tail of that
sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them
wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed
that the tomb's floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in
a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn stone; a
narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly down
into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and
crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a
horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if
chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad
footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw
some side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to
this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous, like
impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour of decay grew
quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through the mountain and
beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so
aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.
Then
I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping of
sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night
had brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had summoned me to this
primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard another sound,
the thin, whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out
before me the boundless vista of an inner world—a vast fungous shore litten by
a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that
flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of
immemorial ocean.
Fainting
and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous
fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around
the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive
him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's promise beyond the snows;
the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the stygian grotto I
saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the
water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in
the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far
away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I
thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I
could not see. But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically
from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame
should, and coating the nitrous stone with a nasty, venomous verdigris. For in
all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death
and corruption.
The
man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the hideous
flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle he faced. At
certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he
held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I
shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned to this festival by the
writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen
flute-player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone
to a scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror
unthinkable and unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth,
transfixed with a dread not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces
between the stars.
Out
of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame,
out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny,
unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained,
hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain
ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards,
nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot
and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and
half with their membranous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants
the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the
reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison
springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.
The
old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained only
because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride like the
rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the amorphous flute-player had
rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently standing by. As
I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was
the true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient
place; that it had been decreed I should come back, and that the most secret
mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient hand, and
when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch,
both with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was a
hideous proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch had been buried
with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.
Presently
the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his
face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a
devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the
lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself. When one of
the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that
the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have
been his head. And then, because that nightmare's position barred me from the
stone staircase down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily
underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung myself
into that putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors before the madness of my
screams could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might
conceal.
At
the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport Harbour at
dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told me
I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night before, and fallen over
the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints found in the snow.
There was nothing I could say, because everything was wrong. Everything was
wrong, with the broad windows showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in
five was ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below.
They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went
delirious at hearing that the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central
Hill, they sent me to St Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better
care. I liked it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me
their influence in obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's
objectionable Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University. They said
something about a "psychosis" and agreed I had better get any
harassing obsessions off my mind.
So
I read that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not new
to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it
was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one—in waking hours—who
could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases
I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I
can make from the awkward Low Latin.
"The
nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming
of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground
where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held
by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no
wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For
it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his
charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of
corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to
vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where
earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to
crawl."
