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.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have
hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if
not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there
came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think
of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread
glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of
separated things--in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of
a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing
out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in
so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep
silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his
notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death
of my grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic
languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor
Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and
had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so
that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many.
Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of
death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the
Newport 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 hillside which formed a short cut from
the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians
were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed
debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk
ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for
the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but
latterly I am inclined to wonder--and more than wonder.

As my granduncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower,
I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for
that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in
Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published
by the American Archeological Society, but there was one box which I
found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing
to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till
it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor
carried always in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it,
but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more
closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay
bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I
found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most
superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor
responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about
five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs,
however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for,
although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do
not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed
certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the
papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this
particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial
intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear
idea of its nature. 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. A pulpy,
tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary
wings; but it was the _general outline_ of the whole which made it most
shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a
Cyclopean architectural background.

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of
press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no
pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was
headed "_CTHULHU CULT_" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid
the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was
divided into two sections, the first of which was headed "1925--Dream
and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.," and
the second, "Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville
St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg--Notes on Same, & Prof.
Webb's Acct." The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some
of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of
them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W.
Scott-Eliott's _Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria_), and the rest comments
on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references
to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books
as Frazer's _Golden Bough_ and Miss Murray's _Witch-Cult in Western
Europe_. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illnesses and
outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.

* * * * *

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar
tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of
neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing
the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and
fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle
had recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode
Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building
near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius
but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention
through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of
relating. He called himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the staid
folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely "queer".
Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social
visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from
other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its
conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the
sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archeological
knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He
spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the
conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
archeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough
to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically
poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which
I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, "It is new,
indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and
dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon."

It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon
a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had
been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable
felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's imagination had been
keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of
great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all
dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics
had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point
below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which
only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render
by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, "_Cthulhu fhtagn_".

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and
disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific
minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief
on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only
in his nightclothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him.
My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness
in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his
questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those
which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies;
and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence
which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in
some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any
cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands
for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the
first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man,
during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose
burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously
in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two
sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters
"_Cthulhu_" and "_R'lyeh_".

On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and
inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an
obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman
Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists
in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of
unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family,
and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling
often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to
be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on
strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of
them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly
dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing "miles high" which
walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object,
but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the
professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity
he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this
object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man's
subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not
greatly above normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such as to
suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On April 2nd at about 3 p. m. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly
ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and
completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the
night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned
to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no
further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with
his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a
week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.

* * * * *

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain
of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought--so much, in
fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy
can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in
question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons
covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his
strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a
prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends
whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports
of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time
past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but
he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any
ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original
correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and
really significant digest. Average people in society and business--New
England's traditional "salt of the earth"--gave an almost completely
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March
23rd and April 2nd--the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific
men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description
suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there
is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came,
and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to
compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half
suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently
resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow
cognizant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes told
a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion
of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams
being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's
delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported
scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described;
and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless
thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with
emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with
leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on
the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later
after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of
hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely
by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal
investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a
few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often
wondered if all the objects of the professor's questioning felt as
puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever
reach them.

The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic,
mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell
must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was
tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here
was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped
from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter
to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces
a dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from California
describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some
"glorious fulfilment" which never arrives, whilst items from India
speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March.
Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report ominous
mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes
bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by
hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland,
too, is full of wild rumor and legendry, and a fantastic painter named
Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous _Dream Landscape_ in the Paris spring
salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane
asylums that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity
from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions.
A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely
envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I
was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters
mentioned by the professor.