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THE CALL OF CTHULHU

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« on: February 27, 2007, 12:35:22 am »

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner,
came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled,
one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad
cacophony of the **** fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water
on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly
hypnotised with horror.

In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an
acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and
twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a
Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn
were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped
bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the
curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in
height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the
noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at
regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head
downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had
disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers
jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from
left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the
ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes
which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard
antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot
deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph
D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly
imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of
great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white
bulk beyond the remotest trees but I suppose he had been hearing too
much native superstition.

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief
duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a
hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their
firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five
minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows
were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end
Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he
forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of
policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded
ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their
fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and
weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low,
mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a
sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava
Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism
to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it
became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro
fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the
creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their
loathsome faith.

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. This was that cult, and
the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden
in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time
when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city
of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again
beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready,
and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even
torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the
conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the
faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever
seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might
say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could
read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The
chanted ritual was not the secret--that was never spoken aloud, only
whispered. The chant meant only this: "In his house at R'lyeh dead
Cthulhu waits dreaming."

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and
the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in
the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black
Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place
in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account
could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from the
immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to
strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the
mountains of China.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the
speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and
transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the
earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the
deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. 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.
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