Name: Call of Cthulhu HP Lovecraft - Audio Book - With Words / Closed Captions
Uploaded: 2014-04-03T18:25:02.000Z
Duration: 1 h 31 min 56 s
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“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival

of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and

legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings

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 aeons 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 grand-uncle’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 Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found

exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing 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 to 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 pretence 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. The 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-Elliot’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 recognised

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 aesthetes 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 archaeological 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 shewed some sharpness in replying, for the

conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology. 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.”

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Call of Cthulhu HP Lovecraft - Audio Book - With Words / Closed Captions

great

alert

tell

strange