curator told me, found it a monstrous puzzle. They vowed that the rock like it did not exist. Then I remembered with a shudder the words that Old Castro told Legrasse about the Old Ones;
“They came from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.”
My rationalistic thinking was shaken. I decided to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Johansen lived, I discovered, in the Old Town. I made a brief taxi-trip. Then I knocked at the door of a neat and ancient building. A sad-faced woman in black came out and told me in broken English that Gustaf Johansen was dead.
It was his wife and she told me something. He did not live long after his return. The sea events in 1925 broke him. He told her no more than he told the public. But he left a long manuscript – of “technical matters” as he said – written in English. During a walk near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers from an attic window knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors[61] at once helped him, but before the ambulance arrived, he was dead. Physicians said that his death occurred due to a heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I felt dark terror now, the terror that will never leave me. At least till I die, “accidentally” or otherwise. I persuaded the widow to get her husband’s “technical matters”. I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a naive sailor’s effort at a diary – to recall day by day that last awful voyage. After I read this story I was unable to hear the sound of the waves anymore. But I will try to retell this story.
Johansen, thank God, did not know everything, even though he saw the city and the Thing. I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space. These blasphemies from elder stars dream beneath the sea and the nightmare cult is ready to let them loose when they have another chance.
Johansen’s voyage began just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma left Auckland on February 20th. The ship felt the full force of the earthquake-born tempest. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress. The Alert stopped the ship on March 22nd. I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of the bombardment and sinking. He speaks with significant horror of the dark cult-fiends on the Alert. Then they went forward driven by curiosity. They sailed in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command. The men saw a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea. In S. Latitude 47°9’, W. Longitude l23°43’, they came upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror. It was the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh. This city was built in measureless ages behind history by the vast, loathsome creatures that came down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults. They were sending out at last the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive. These thoughts called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel actually emerged from the waters. Here great Cthulhu was buried. When I think what else lies there I almost want to kill myself. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder demons. They probably guessed that it was nothing of this planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the height of the great carven monolith, and at the identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is visible in every line of the frightened description. Johansen had no idea of futurism. But his description of the city was very similar to it: great stone surfaces, vast angles, horrible images and hieroglyphs. The whole geometry of this place was not normal, just like in Wilcox awful dream.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis. They climbed slipperily up over titan oozy blocks. Even the sun seemed distorted. The menace was lurking in the corners of this carven rock.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese[62] who climbed up the foot of the monolith. He shouted of what he found. The rest followed him. They looked curiously at the immense carved door with the squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door. But they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door[63] or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. The sea and the ground were not horizontal, because the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan studied the edge and pressed each point separately. He climbed along the grotesque stone moulding. The door was impossibly vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to go down; and they saw that it was balanced. Everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this prismatic distortion it moved in a diagonal way.
The aperture was black. The odour that rose from the newly opened depths was intolerable. Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened. Everyone was listening still when It appeared. It gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness[64].
Of the six men who never reached the ship, two died of fear immediately. The Thing cannot be described. There is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy[65]. It contradicted all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! No wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant. The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, awaked to claim his own[66]. The stars were right again. What an age-old cult failed to do, a band of innocent sailors did by accident. After millions of years great Cthulhu was loose again. And It was ravening for delight.
The flabby claws swept three men up before anybody turned. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were running to the boat. Johansen swears he was swallowed up by a masonry. When Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert, the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and was floundering at the edge of the water.
Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, the Alert began to sail. Then on the masonry of that shore great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue. Briden looked back and went mad. He was laughing till death found him one night in the cabin while Johansen was wandering deliriously.
But Johansen did not surrender. He knew that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert. So he set the engine for full speed, and reversed the wheel. The brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly. The awful squid-head came to the bowsprit but Johansen drove on relentlessly.
There was a horrific bursting as of an exploding bladder, a stench as of a thousand opened graves. There was a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was hidden by an acrid green cloud. And – God in heaven! The distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only watched the idol in the cabin and prepared some food for himself and the laughing maniac. He did not try to navigate, for he was completely exhausted. Then came the storm of April 2nd. He lost his consciousness.
One day came rescue – the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house. He did not tell anything. Everybody would call him mad. He wrote of what he knew before death came. Death will be a boon if only it deletes the memories.
That was the document I read. Now I placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. This record of mine will be placed with them. I do not think my life will be long. 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