Lovecraft’s Haunting Dimensions | From Innsmouth to the Awakening of Cthulhu (With Rain & Thunder)

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Enter the haunting world of H.P. Lovecraft with this immersive audiobook collection, set against the backdrop of rain and thunder. These terrifying tales explore ancient civilizations, psychological horror, and unspeakable cosmic entities. Perfect for late-night listening, sleep ambience, or horror fans who crave the unknown.

🔹 Stories Included:

The Horror in the Burying-Ground – A dark tale of reanimated dead and chilling revenge.

The Shadow over Innsmouth – A decaying town hides monstrous secrets beneath the waves.

The Call of Cthulhu – The legendary rise of a cosmic god from the deep sea.

🔊 Featuring immersive rain and thunder sounds to enhance the eerie, atmospheric experience.

🌀 Why Listen?
✔️ Perfect for fans of cosmic horror, dark ambient audiobooks, and Lovecraftian nightmares
✔️ Ideal for sleep, study, or background ambience
✔️ Explores themes of isolation, forbidden knowledge, and unseen realities

🔹 Written by: H.P. Lovecraft
🔹 Genres: Cosmic Horror · Weird Fiction · Classic Supernatural Horror
🔹 Core Themes: Lost Civilizations · Isolation & Madness · Forbidden Knowledge · Unseen Dimensions · Psychological Dread

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Lovecraft audiobook, H.P. Lovecraft rain sounds, Call of Cthulhu audiobook, Shadow over Innsmouth full story, horror stories with rain, atmospheric horror, cosmic horror stories, scary audiobooks rain, horror to sleep to, thunderstorm background, reanimated dead story, ancient gods Lovecraft

⏱️ Timestamps / Chapters:

00:02 – The Horror in the Burying-Ground
33:47 – The Shadow over Innsmouth
03:09:59 – The Call of Cthulhu

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In the shadow of an ancient cemetery, where graves 
lie forgotten and the very earth seems to hold its breath, an unexpected encounter leads to a terror 
that reaches far beyond the boundaries of death. The sleepy town of Arkham, familiar yet strange, 
becomes the backdrop for a mystery—one that draws a scholar into the clutches of something 
not entirely human, nor entirely dead. Welcome to Shadows of Weekend. Tonight, we 
explore The Horror in the Burying-Ground, a tale written by H. P. Lovecraft in collaboration 
with Hazel Heald. This eerie story takes us deep into a burial site where the dead may not be as 
silent as we think. Like, share, and subscribe as we uncover the sinister secrets hidden beneath 
the earth, waiting for the right moment to rise. When the state highway to Rutland is closed, 
travellers are forced to take the Stillwater road past Swamp Hollow. The scenery is superb in 
places, yet somehow the route has been unpopular for years. There is something depressing 
about it, especially near Stillwater itself. Motorists feel subtly uncomfortable 
about the tightly shuttered farmhouse on the knoll just north of the village, and 
about the white-bearded half-wit who haunts the old burying-ground on the south, apparently 
talking to the occupants of some of the graves. Not much is left of Stillwater, now. The 
soil is played out, and most of the people have drifted to the towns across the distant 
river or to the city beyond the distant hills. The steeple of the old white church has fallen 
down, and half of the twenty-odd straggling houses are empty and in various stages of decay. Normal 
life is found only around Peck’s general store and filling-station, and it is here that the curious 
stop now and then to ask about the shuttered house and the idiot who mutters to the dead.
Most of the questioners come away with a touch of distaste and disquiet. They find the shabby 
loungers oddly unpleasant and full of unnamed hints in speaking of the long-past events brought 
up. There is a menacing, portentous quality in the tones which they use to describe very ordinary 
events—a seemingly unjustified tendency to assume a furtive, suggestive, confidential 
air, and to fall into awesome whispers at certain points—which insidiously disturbs the 
listener. Old Yankees often talk like that; but in this case the melancholy aspect of the 
half-mouldering village, and the dismal nature of the story unfolded, give these gloomy, 
secretive mannerisms an added significance. One feels profoundly the quintessential horror 
that lurks behind the isolated Puritan and his strange repressions—feels it, and longs 
to escape precipitately into clearer air. The loungers whisper impressively that the 
shuttered house is that of old Miss Sprague—Sophie Sprague, whose brother Tom was buried on the 
seventeenth of June, back in ’86. Sophie was never the same after that funeral—that and the other 
thing which happened the same day—and in the end she took to staying in all the time. Won’t even 
be seen now, but leaves notes under the back-door mat and has her things brought from the store by 
Ned Peck’s boy. Afraid of something—the old Swamp Hollow burying-ground most of all. Never could 
be dragged near there since her brother—and the other one—were laid away. Not much wonder, though, 
seeing the way crazy Johnny Dow rants. He hangs around the burying-ground all day and sometimes at 
night, and claims he talks with Tom—and the other. Then he marches by Sophie’s house and shouts 
things at her—that’s why she began to keep the shutters closed. He says things are coming 
from somewhere to get her sometime. Ought to be stopped, but one can’t be too hard on poor Johnny. 
Besides, Steve Barbour always had his opinions. Johnny does his talking to two of the graves. 
One of them is Tom Sprague’s. The other, at the opposite end of the graveyard, is that 
of Henry Thorndike, who was buried on the same day. Henry was the village undertaker—the only 
one in miles—and never liked around Stillwater. A city fellow from Rutland—been to college and 
full of book learning. Read queer things nobody else ever heard of, and mixed chemicals for no 
good purpose. Always trying to invent something new—some new-fangled embalming-fluid or some 
foolish kind of medicine. Some folks said he had tried to be a doctor but failed in his studies 
and took to the next best profession. Of course, there wasn’t much undertaking to do in a place 
like Stillwater, but Henry farmed on the side. Mean, morbid disposition—and a secret drinker 
if you could judge by the empty bottles in his rubbish heap. No wonder Tom Sprague hated him 
and blackballed him from the Masonic lodge, and warned him off when he tried to make up to 
Sophie. The way he experimented on animals was against Nature and Scripture. Who could forget 
the state that collie dog was found in, or what happened to old Mrs. Akeley’s cat? Then there 
was the matter of Deacon Leavitt’s calf, when Tom had led a band of the village boys to demand 
an accounting. The curious thing was that the calf came alive after all in the end, though Tom had 
found it as stiff as a poker. Some said the joke was on Tom, but Thorndike probably thought 
otherwise, since he had gone down under his enemy’s fist before the mistake was discovered.
Tom, of course, was half drunk at the time. He was a vicious brute at best, and kept his poor 
sister half cowed with threats. That’s probably why she is such a fear-racked creature still. 
There were only the two of them, and Tom would never let her leave because that meant splitting 
the property. Most of the fellows were too afraid of him to shine up to Sophie—he stood six feet 
one in his stockings—but Henry Thorndike was a sly cuss who had ways of doing things behind 
folks’ backs. He wasn’t much to look at, but Sophie never discouraged him any. Mean and 
ugly as he was, she’d have been glad if anybody could have freed her from her brother. She may 
not have stopped to wonder how she could get clear of him after he got her clear of Tom.
Well, that was the way things stood in June of ’86. Up to this point, the whispers of the 
loungers at Peck’s store are not so unbearably portentous; but as they continue, the element 
of secretiveness and malign tension grows. Tom Sprague, it appears, used to go to Rutland 
on periodic sprees, his absences being Henry Thorndike’s great opportunities. He was always 
in bad shape when he got back, and old Dr. Pratt, deaf and half blind though he was, used to 
warn him about his heart, and about the danger of delirium tremens. Folks could always tell by 
the shouting and cursing when he was home again. It was on the ninth of June—on a Wednesday, 
the day after young Joshua Goodenough finished building his new-fangled silo—that Tom started out 
on his last and longest spree. He came back the next Tuesday morning and folks at the store saw 
him lashing his bay stallion the way he did when whiskey had a hold of him. Then there came shouts 
and shrieks and oaths from the Sprague house, and the first thing anybody knew Sophie was 
running over to old Dr. Pratt’s at top speed. The doctor found Thorndike at Sprague’s when he 
got there, and Tom was on the bed in his room, with eyes staring and foam around his mouth. Old 
Pratt fumbled around and gave the usual tests, then shook his head solemnly and told Sophie 
she had suffered a great bereavement—that her nearest and dearest had passed through the pearly 
gates to a better land, just as everybody knew he would if he didn’t let up on his drinking.
Sophie kind of sniffled, the loungers whisper, but didn’t seem to take on much. Thorndike didn’t 
do anything but smile—perhaps at the ironic fact that he, always an enemy, was now the only person 
who could be of any use to Thomas Sprague. He shouted something in old Dr. Pratt’s half-good 
ear about the need of having the funeral early on account of Tom’s condition. Drunks like that were 
always doubtful subjects, and any extra delay—with merely rural facilities—would entail consequences, 
visual and otherwise, hardly acceptable to the deceased’s loving mourners. The doctor had 
muttered that Tom’s alcoholic career ought to have embalmed him pretty well in advance, but Thorndike 
assured him to the contrary, at the same time boasting of his own skill, and of the superior 
methods he had devised through his experiments. It is here that the whispers of the loungers grow 
acutely disturbing. Up to this point the story is usually told by Ezra Davenport, or Luther Fry, 
if Ezra is laid up with chilblains, as he is apt to be in winter; but from there on old Calvin 
Wheeler takes up the thread, and his voice has a damnably insidious way of suggesting hidden 
horror. If Johnny Dow happens to be passing by there is always a pause, for Stillwater does not 
like to have Johnny talk too much with strangers. Calvin edges close to the traveller and sometimes 
seizes a coat-lapel with his gnarled, mottled hand while he half shuts his watery blue eyes.
“Well, sir,” he whispers, “Henry he went home an’ got his undertaker’s fixin’s—crazy Johnny 
Dow lugged most of ’em, for he was always doin’ chores for Henry—an’ says as Doc Pratt an’ crazy 
Johnny should help lay out the body. Doc always did say as how he thought Henry talked too 
much—a-boastin’ what a fine workman he was, an’ how lucky it was that Stillwater had a 
reg’lar undertaker instead of buryin’ folks jest as they was, like they do over to Whitby.
“‘Suppose,’ says he, ‘some fellow was to be took with some of them paralysin’ cramps like 
you read about. How’d a body like it when they lowered him down and begun shovelin’ the dirt 
back? How’d he like it when he was chokin’ down there under the new headstone, scratchin’ an’ 
tearin’ if he chanced to get back the power, but all the time knowin’ it wasn’t no use? No, 
sir, I tell you it’s a blessin’ Stillwater’s got a smart doctor as knows when a man’s dead and when 
he ain’t, and a trained undertaker who can fix a corpse so he’ll stay put without no trouble.’
“That was the way Henry went on talkin’, most like he was talkin’ to poor Tom’s remains; and old 
Doc Pratt he didn’t like what he was able to catch of it, even though Henry did call him a smart 
doctor. Crazy Johnny kept watchin’ of the corpse, and it didn’t make it none too pleasant the way 
he’d slobber about things like, ‘He ain’t cold, Doc,’ or ‘I see his eyelids move,’ or ‘There’s 
a hole in his arm jest like the ones I git when Henry gives me a syringe full of what makes 
me feel good.’ Thorndike shut him up on that, though we all knowed he’d been givin’ 
poor Johnny drugs. It’s a wonder the poor fellow ever got clear of the habit.
“But the worst thing, accordin’ to the doctor, was the way the body jerked up when Henry begun 
to shoot it full of embalmin’-fluid. He’d been boastin’ about what a fine new formula he’d 
got practicin’ on cats and dogs, when all of a sudden Tom’s corpse began to double up like it 
was alive and fixin’ to wrassle. Land of Goshen, but Doc says he was scared stiff, though he 
knowed the way corpses act when the muscles begin to stiffen. Well, sir, the long and short of 
it is, that the corpse sat up an’ grabbed a holt of Thorndike’s syringe so that it got stuck in 
Henry hisself, an’ give him as neat a dose of his own embalmin’-fluid as you’d wish to see. That 
got Henry pretty scared, though he yanked the point out and managed to get the body down again 
and shot full of the fluid. He kept measurin’ more of the stuff out as though he wanted to be sure 
there was enough, and kept reassurin’ himself as not much had got into him, but crazy Johnny begun 
singin’ out, ‘That’s what you give Lige Hopkins’s dog when it got all dead an’ stiff an’ then waked 
up agin. Now you’re a-going to get dead an’ stiff like Tom Sprague be! Remember it don’t set to work 
till after a long spell if you don’t get much.’ “Sophie, she was downstairs with some of the 
neighbours—my wife Matildy, she that’s dead an’ gone this thirty year, was one of them. They 
were all tryin’ to find out whether Thorndike was over when Tom came home, and whether findin’ him 
there was what set poor Tom off. I may as well say as some folks thought it mighty funny that Sophie 
didn’t carry on more, nor mind the way Thorndike had smiled. Not as anybody was hintin’ that Henry 
helped Tom off with some of his queer cooked-up fluids and syringes, or that Sophie would keep 
still if she thought so—but you know how folks will guess behind a body’s back. We all knowed 
the nigh crazy way Thorndike had hated Tom—not without reason, at that—and Emily Barbour 
says to my Matildy as how Henry was lucky to have ol’ Doc Pratt right on the spot with a death 
certificate as didn’t leave no doubt for nobody.” When old Calvin gets to this point he usually 
begins to mumble indistinguishably in his straggling, dirty white beard. Most 
listeners try to edge away from him, and he seldom appears to heed the gesture. It is 
generally Fred Peck, who was a very small boy at the time of the events, who continues the tale.
Thomas Sprague’s funeral was held on Thursday, June 17th, only two days after his death. Such 
haste was thought almost indecent in remote and inaccessible Stillwater, where long distances had 
to be covered by those who came, but Thorndike had insisted that the peculiar condition of the 
deceased demanded it. The undertaker had seemed rather nervous since preparing the body, and 
could be seen frequently feeling his pulse. Old Dr. Pratt thought he must be worrying about the 
accidental dose of embalming-fluid. Naturally, the story of the “laying out” had spread, so that 
a double zest animated the mourners who assembled to glut their curiosity and morbid interest.
Thorndike, though he was obviously upset, seemed intent on doing his professional duty in 
magnificent style. Sophie and others who saw the body were most startled by its utter lifelikeness, 
and the mortuary virtuoso made doubly sure of his job by repeating certain injections at stated 
intervals. He almost wrung a sort of reluctant admiration from the townsfolk and visitors, 
though he tended to spoil that impression by his boastful and tasteless talk. Whenever 
he administered to his silent charge he would repeat that eternal rambling about the 
good luck of having a first-class undertaker. What—he would say as if directly addressing 
the body—if Tom had had one of those careless fellows who bury their subjects alive? The 
way he harped on the horrors of premature burial was truly barbarous and sickening.
Services were held in the stuffy best room—opened for the first time since Mrs. Sprague 
died. The tuneless little parlour organ groaned disconsolately, and the coffin, supported on 
trestles near the hall door, was covered with sickly-smelling flowers. It was obvious that a 
record-breaking crowd was assembling from far and near, and Sophie endeavoured to look properly 
grief-stricken for their benefit. At unguarded moments she seemed both puzzled and uneasy, 
dividing her scrutiny between the feverish-looking undertaker and the life-like body of her brother. 
A slow disgust at Thorndike seemed to be brewing within her, and neighbours whispered freely that 
she would soon send him about his business now that Tom was out of the way—that is, if she could, 
for such a slick customer was sometimes hard to deal with. But with her money and remaining 
looks she might be able to get another fellow, and he’d probably take care of Henry well enough.
As the organ wheezed into Beautiful Isle of Somewhere the Methodist church choir added their 
lugubrious voices to the gruesome cacophony, and everyone looked piously 
at Deacon Leavitt—everyone, that is, except crazy Johnny Dow, who kept his 
eyes glued to the still form beneath the glass of the coffin. He was muttering softly to himself.
Stephen Barbour—from the next farm—was the only one who noticed Johnny. He shivered as he saw 
that the idiot was talking directly to the corpse, and even making foolish signs with his fingers as 
if to taunt the sleeper beneath the plate glass. Tom, he reflected, had kicked poor Johnny around 
on more than one occasion, though probably not without provocation. Something about this whole 
event was getting on Stephen’s nerves. There was a suppressed tension and brooding abnormality in 
the air for which he could not account. Johnny ought not to have been allowed in 
the house—and it was curious what an effort Thorndike seemed to be making not 
to look at the body. Every now and then the undertaker would feel his pulse with an odd air.
The Reverend Silas Atwood droned on in a plaintive monotone about the deceased—about the striking of 
Death’s sword in the midst of this little family, breaking the earthly tie between this loving 
brother and sister. Several of the neighbours looked furtively at one another from beneath 
lowered eyelids, while Sophie actually began to sob nervously. Thorndike moved to 
her side and tried to reassure her, but she seemed to shrink curiously away from 
him. His motions were distinctly uneasy, and he seemed to feel acutely the abnormal 
tension permeating the air. Finally, conscious of his duty as master of ceremonies, he stepped 
forward and announced in a sepulchral voice that the body might be viewed for the last time.
Slowly the friends and neighbours filed past the bier, from which Thorndike roughly dragged crazy 
Johnny away. Tom seemed to be resting peacefully. That devil had been handsome in his day. A few 
genuine sobs—and many feigned ones—were heard, though most of the crowd were content to stare 
curiously and whisper afterward. Steve Barbour lingered long and attentively over the still 
face, and moved away shaking his head. His wife, Emily, following after him, whispered that Henry 
Thorndike had better not boast so much about his work, for Tom’s eyes had come open. They had been 
shut when the services began, for she had been up and looked. But they certainly looked natural—not 
the way one would expect after two days. When Fred Peck gets this far he usually pauses 
as if he did not like to continue. The listener, too, tends to feel that something unpleasant is 
ahead. But Peck reassures his audience with the statement that what happened isn’t as bad as 
folks like to hint. Even Steve never put into words what he may have thought, and crazy 
Johnny, of course, can’t be counted at all. It was Luella Morse—the nervous old maid 
who sang in the choir—who seems to have touched things off. She was filing past 
the coffin like the rest, but stopped to peer a little closer than anyone else except the 
Barbours had peered. And then, without warning, she gave a shrill scream and fell in a dead faint.
Naturally, the room was at once a chaos of confusion. Old Dr. Pratt elbowed his way to Luella 
and called for some water to throw in her face, and others surged up to look at her and at the 
coffin. Johnny Dow began chanting to himself, “He knows, he knows, he kin hear all 
we’re a-sayin’ and see all we’re a-doin’, and they’ll bury him that way”—but no one stopped 
to decipher his mumbling except Steve Barbour. In a very few moments Luella began to come 
out of her faint, and could not tell exactly what had startled her. All she could whisper 
was, “The way he looked—the way he looked.” But to other eyes the body seemed exactly 
the same. It was a gruesome sight, though, with those open eyes and that high colouring.
And then the bewildered crowd noticed something which put both Luella and the body out of 
their minds for a moment. It was Thorndike—on whom the sudden excitement and jostling crowd 
seemed to be having a curiously bad effect. He had evidently been knocked down in the general 
bustle, and was on the floor trying to drag himself to a sitting posture. The expression 
on his face was terrifying in the extreme, and his eyes were beginning to take on a glazed, 
fishy expression. He could scarcely speak aloud, but the husky rattle of his throat held an 
ineffable desperation which was obvious to all. “Get me home, quick, and let me be. That fluid I 
got in my arm by mistake heart action this damned excitement too much wait wait don’t think 
I’m dead if I seem to only the fluid—just get me home and wait I’ll come to later, don’t 
know how long all the time I’ll be conscious and know what’s going on don’t be deceived .”
As his words trailed off into nothingness old Dr. Pratt reached him and felt his pulse—watching 
a long time and finally shaking his head. “No use doing anything—he’s gone. Heart no good—and 
that fluid he got in his arm must have been bad stuff. I don’t know what it is.”
A kind of numbness seemed to fall on all the company. New death in the chamber of 
death! Only Steve Barbour thought to bring up Thorndike’s last choking words. Was he surely 
dead, when he himself had said he might falsely seem so? Wouldn’t it be better to wait a while 
and see what would happen? And for that matter, what harm would it do if Doc Pratt were to give 
Tom Sprague another looking over before burial? Crazy Johnny was moaning, and had flung himself 
on Thorndike’s body like a faithful dog. “Don’t ye bury him, don’t ye bury him! He ain’t dead no more 
nor Lige Hopkins’s dog nor Deacon Leavitt’s calf was when he shot ’em full. He’s got some stuff 
he puts into ye to make ye seem like dead when ye ain’t! Ye seem like dead but ye know everything 
what’s a-goin’ on, and the next day ye come to as good as ever. Don’t ye bury him—he’ll come to 
under the earth an’ he can’t scratch up! He’s a good man, an’ not like Tom Sprague. Hope to Gawd 
Tom scratches an’ chokes for hours an’ hours .” But no one save Barbour was paying 
any attention to poor Johnny. Indeed, what Steve himself had said had evidently fallen 
on deaf ears. Uncertainty was everywhere. Old Doc Pratt was applying final tests and mumbling 
about death certificate blanks, and unctuous Elder Atwood was suggesting that something be done about 
a double interment. With Thorndike dead there was no undertaker this side of Rutland, and it would 
mean a terrible expense if one were to be brought from there, and if Thorndike were not embalmed in 
this hot June weather—well, one couldn’t tell. And there were no relatives or friends to be critical 
unless Sophie chose to be—but Sophie was on the other side of the room, staring silently, fixedly, 
and almost morbidly into her brother’s coffin. Deacon Leavitt tried to restore a semblance 
of decorum, and had poor Thorndike carried across the hall to the sitting-room, meanwhile 
sending Zenas Wells and Walter Perkins over to the undertaker’s house for a coffin of the right 
size. The key was in Henry’s trousers pocket. Johnny continued to whine and paw at the body, 
and Elder Atwood busied himself with inquiring about Thorndike’s denomination—for Henry had not 
attended local services. When it was decided that his folks in Rutland—all dead now—had been 
Baptists, the Reverend Silas decided that Deacon Leavitt had better offer the brief prayer.
It was a gala day for the funeral-fanciers of Stillwater and vicinity. Even Luella had recovered 
enough to stay. Gossip, murmured and whispered, buzzed busily while a few composing touches were 
given to Thorndike’s cooling, stiffening form. Johnny had been cuffed out of the house, as most 
agreed he should have been in the first place, but his distant howls were now 
and then wafted gruesomely in. When the body was encoffined and laid out 
beside that of Thomas Sprague, the silent, almost frightening-looking Sophie gazed intently 
at it as she had gazed at her brother’s. She had not uttered a word for a dangerously long time, 
and the mixed expression on her face was past all describing or interpreting. As the others 
withdrew to leave her alone with the dead she managed to find a sort of mechanical speech, but 
no one could make out the words, and she seemed to be talking first to one body and then the other.
And now, with what would seem to an outsider the acme of gruesome unconscious comedy, the whole 
funeral mummery of the afternoon was listlessly repeated. Again the organ wheezed, again the 
choir screeched and scraped, again a droning incantation arose, and again the morbidly curious 
spectators filed past a macabre object—this time a dual array of mortuary repose. Some of the more 
sensitive people shivered at the whole proceeding, and again Stephen Barbour felt an underlying note 
of eldritch horror and daemoniac abnormality. God, how life-like both of those corpses were and 
how in earnest poor Thorndike had been about not wanting to be judged dead and how he hated 
Tom Sprague but what could one do in the face of common sense—a dead man was a dead man, 
and there was old Doc Pratt with his years of experience if nobody else bothered, why 
should one bother oneself? Whatever Tom had got he had probably deserved and if Henry 
had done anything to him, the score was even now well, Sophie was free at last .
As the peering procession moved at last toward the hall and the outer door, Sophie 
was alone with the dead once more. Elder Atwood was out in the road talking to the 
hearse-driver from Lee’s livery stable, and Deacon Leavitt was arranging for a double 
quota of pall-bearers. Luckily the hearse would hold two coffins. No hurry—Ed Plummer and Ethan 
Stone were going ahead with shovels to dig the second grave. There would be three livery hacks 
and any number of private rigs in the cavalcade—no use trying to keep the crowd away from the graves.
Then came that frantic scream from the parlour where Sophie and the bodies were. Its suddenness 
almost paralysed the crowd and brought back the same sensation which had surged up when Luella 
had screamed and fainted. Steve Barbour and Deacon Leavitt started to go in, but before they 
could enter the house Sophie was bursting forth, sobbing and gasping about “That face at 
the window! that face at the window! ” At the same time a wild-eyed figure rounded 
the corner of the house, removing all mystery from Sophie’s dramatic cry. It was, very 
obviously, the face’s owner—poor crazy Johnny, who began to leap up and down, pointing at Sophie 
and shrieking, “She knows! She knows! I seen it in her face when she looked at ’em and talked 
to ’em! She knows, and she’s a-lettin’ ’em go down in the earth to scratch an’ claw for air 
. But they’ll talk to her so’s she kin hear ’em they’ll talk to her, an’ appear to her 
and some day they’ll come back an’ git her!“ Zenas Wells dragged the shrieking half-wit to 
a woodshed behind the house and bolted him in as best he could. His screams and poundings 
could be heard at a distance, but nobody paid him any further attention. The procession was 
made up, and with Sophie in the first hack it slowly covered the short distance past the 
village to the Swamp Hollow burying-ground. Elder Atwood made appropriate remarks as Thomas 
Sprague was laid to rest, and by the time he was through, Ed and Ethan had finished Thorndike’s 
grave on the other side of the cemetery—to which the crowd presently shifted. Deacon Leavitt 
then spoke ornamentally, and the lowering process was repeated. People had begun to drift off in 
knots, and the clatter of receding buggies and carry-alls was quite universal, when the shovels 
began to fly again. As the earth thudded down on the coffin-lids, Thorndike’s first, Steve Barbour 
noticed the queer expressions flitting over Sophie Sprague’s face. He couldn’t keep track of them 
all, but behind the rest there seemed to lurk a sort of wry, perverse, half-suppressed 
look of vague triumph. He shook his head. Zenas had run back and let crazy Johnny out of 
the woodshed before Sophie got home, and the poor fellow at once made frantically for the graveyard. 
He arrived before the shovelmen were through, and while many of the curious mourners were 
still lingering about. What he shouted into Tom Sprague’s partly filled grave, and how he clawed 
at the loose earth of Thorndike’s freshly finished mound across the cemetery, surviving spectators 
still shudder to recall. Jotham Blake, the constable, had to take him back to the town farm 
by force, and his screams waked dreadful echoes. This is where Fred Peck usually leaves 
off the story. What more, he asks, is there to tell? It was a gloomy tragedy, and 
one can scarcely wonder that Sophie grew queer after that. That is all one hears if the hour is 
so late that old Calvin Wheeler has tottered home, but when he is still around he breaks in 
again with that damnably suggestive and insidious whisper. Sometimes those who hear him 
dread to pass either the shuttered house or the graveyard afterward, especially after dark.
“Heh, heh Fred was only a little shaver then, and don’t remember no more than half of what was 
goin’ on! You want to know why Sophie keeps her house shuttered, and why crazy Johnny still keeps 
a-talkin’ to the dead and a-shoutin’ at Sophie’s windows? Well, sir, I don’t know’s I know all 
there is to know, but I hear what I hear.” Here the old man ejects his cud of tobacco 
and leans forward to buttonhole the listener. “It was that same night, mind ye—toward mornin’, 
and just eight hours after them burials—when we heard the first scream from Sophie’s house. 
Woke us all up—Steve and Emily Barbour and me and Matildy goes over hot-footin’, all in 
night gear, and finds Sophie all dressed and dead fainted on the settin’-room floor. Lucky 
she hadn’t locked the door. When we got her to she was shakin’ like a leaf, and wouldn’t let on 
by so much as a word what was ailin’ her. Matildy and Emily done what they could to quiet her down, 
but Steve whispered things to me as didn’t make me none too easy. Come about an hour when we allowed 
we’d be goin’ home soon, that Sophie she begun to tip her head on one side like she was a-listenin’ 
to somethin’. Then on a sudden she screamed again, and keeled over in another faint.
“Well, sir, I’m tellin’ what I’m tellin’, and won’t do no guessin’ like Steve 
Barbour would a done if he dared. He always was the greatest hand for hintin’ 
things died ten years ago of pneumony . “What we heard so faint-like was just poor 
crazy Johnny, of course. ’Taint more than a mile to the buryin’-ground, and he must a got 
out of the window where they’d locked him up at the town farm—even if Constable Blake says 
he didn’t get out that night. From that day to this he hangs around them graves a-talkin’ to the 
both of them—cussin’ and kickin’ at Tom’s mound, and puttin’ posies and things on Henry’s. 
And when he ain’t a-doin’ that he’s hangin’ around Sophie’s shuttered windows howlin’ 
about what’s a-comin’ soon to git her. “She wouldn’t never go near the buryin’-ground, 
and now she won’t come out of the house at all nor see nobody. Got to sayin’ there was a curse on 
Stillwater—and I’m dinged if she ain’t half right, the way things is a-goin’ to pieces these 
days. There certainly was somethin’ queer about Sophie right along. Once when Sally 
Hopkins was a-callin’ on her—in ’97 or ’98, I think it was—there was an awful rattlin’ at 
her winders—and Johnny was safe locked up at the time—at least, so Constable Dodge swore up 
and down. But I ain’t takin’ no stock in their stories about noises every seventeenth of June, or 
about faint shinin’ figures a-tryin’ Sophie’s door and winders every black mornin’ about two o’clock.
“You see, it was about two o’clock in the mornin’ that Sophie heard the sounds and keeled over twice 
that first night after the buryin’. Steve and me, and Matildy and Emily, heard the second lot, 
faint as it was, just like I told you. And I’m a-tellin’ you again as how it must a been 
crazy Johnny over to the buryin’-ground, let Jotham Blake claim what he will. There ain’t 
no tellin’ the sound of a man’s voice so far off, and with our heads full of nonsense it ain’t 
no wonder we thought there was two voices—and voices that hadn’t ought to be speakin’ at all.
“Steve, he claimed to have heard more than I did. I verily believe he took some stock in 
ghosts. Matildy and Emily was so scared they didn’t remember what they heard. And 
curious enough, nobody else in town—if anybody was awake at the ungodly hour—never 
said nothin’ about hearin’ no sounds at all. “Whatever it was, was so faint it might have 
been the wind if there hadn’t been words. I made out a few, but don’t want to say as I’d 
back up all Steve claimed to have caught . “‘She-devil’ ‘all the time’ ‘Henry’ and 
‘alive’ was plain and so was ‘you know’ ‘said you’d stand by’ ‘get rid of him’ and 
‘bury me’ in a kind of changed voice . Then there was that awful ‘comin’ again some day’—in 
a death-like squawk but you can’t tell me Johnny couldn’t have made those sounds .
“Hey, you! What’s takin’ you off in such a hurry? Mebbe there’s more 
I could tell you if I had a mind .” The cemetery, once a place of quiet repose, 
has now become a site of unspeakable horror. In the end, we are left with the chilling 
realization that the boundary between the living and the dead is far thinner 
than we ever dared to believe. Perhaps, as the ancient stones whisper, there are forces 
at work in the earth that we should never disturb. Thank you for joining us for The Horror in the 
Burying-Ground. Do you think the dead truly rest, or do they stir, waiting for a moment to 
rise? Share your thoughts below. For more tales of creeping dread and forbidden knowledge, 
don’t forget to subscribe to Shadows of Weekend. Until next time, tread carefully—there 
are graves that should never be disturbed. Nestled on a remote stretch of the Massachusetts 
coast, the town of Innsmouth holds a secret buried beneath its fog-covered streets. 
A place of isolation and strange customs, where the inhabitants are as strange as the 
eerie waters that lap against the shore. For one young man, a visit to Innsmouth will 
uncover a horrifying truth—one that ties the town’s curse to something far older, far darker, 
and more monstrous than he could ever imagine. Welcome to Shadows of Weekend. Tonight, we 
dive deep into The Shadow over Innsmouth, a chilling tale of cosmic horror, 
human degeneration, and the ancient, underwater gods that lurk beneath the waves. 
As the narrator’s investigation reveals, some secrets are better left buried in the 
depths. Like, share, and subscribe as we explore the dreadful history of Innsmouth—where 
the truth is a shadow that can never be outrun. During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the 
Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient 
Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast 
series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting—under 
suitable precautions—of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty 
houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one 
of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor. Keener news-followers, however, wondered 
at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force 
of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the 
prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen 
thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and 
concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing 
positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning 
to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence. Complaints from many liberal organisations 
were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips 
to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and 
reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the 
government in the end. Only one paper—a tabloid always discounted because of its wild 
policy—mentioned the deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss 
just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather 
far-fetched; since the low, black reef lies a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, 
but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted 
Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had 
whispered and hinted years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was now 
no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew very little; for wide salt 
marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, 
are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting 
of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly 
have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even 
to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair 
has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which 
are yet to drive me to drastic measures. It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth 
in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry 
and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair 
was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, 
I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured 
and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps 
me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to 
succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding 
a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me. I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before 
I saw it for the first and—so far—last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour 
of New England—sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical—and had planned to go directly 
from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived. I had no car, but 
was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In 
Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only 
at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The 
stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward 
my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.
“You could take that old bus, I suppose,” he said with a certain hesitation, “but it ain’t 
thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth—you may have heard about that—and so 
the people don’t like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow—Joe Sargent—but never gets any custom from 
here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s’pose it’s cheap enough, 
but I never see more’n two or three people in it—nobody but those Innsmouth folks. Leaves the 
Square—front of Hammond’s Drug Store—at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they’ve changed lately. Looks 
like a terrible rattletrap—I’ve never ben on it.” That was the first I ever heard of shadowed 
Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shewn on common maps or listed in recent guide-books would 
have interested me, and the agent’s odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. 
A town able to inspire such dislike in its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather 
unusual, and worthy of a tourist’s attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there—and 
so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an 
air of feeling slightly superior to what he said. “Innsmouth? Well, it’s a queer kind of a town down 
at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city—quite a port before the War of 1812—but all 
gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now—B. & M. never went through, and the 
branch line from Rowley was given up years ago. “More empty houses than there are people, I guess, 
and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly here or 
in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing’s left now except one gold 
refinery running on the leanest kind of part time. “That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, 
and Old Man Marsh, who owns it, must be richer’n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty 
close in his home. He’s supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that 
makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother 
seems to’ve ben some kind of foreigner—they say a South Sea islander—so everybody raised 
Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth 
people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have 
in ’em. But Marsh’s children and grandchildren look just like anyone else so far’s I can see. 
I’ve had ’em pointed out to me here—though, come to think of it, the elder children don’t 
seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man. “And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? 
Well, young fellow, you mustn’t take too much stock in what people around here say. 
They’re hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They’ve ben 
telling things about Innsmouth—whispering ’em, mostly—for the last hundred years, I guess, and 
I gather they’re more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh—about 
old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in 
Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the 
wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts—but I come from Panton, Vermont, 
and that kind of story don’t go down with me. “You ought to hear, though, what some of 
the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast—Devil Reef, they call it. It’s 
well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could 
hardly call it an island. The story is that there’s a whole legion of devils seen sometimes 
on that reef—sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It’s a 
rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors 
used to make big detours just to avoid it. “That is, sailors that didn’t hail from Innsmouth. 
One of the things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it 
sometimes at night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was 
interesting, and it’s just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but 
there was talk of his dealing with daemons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the 
Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef. “That was before the big epidemic of 1846, 
when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out 
what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China 
or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough—there was riots over it, and all 
sorts of ghastly doings that I don’t believe ever got outside of town—and it left the place 
in awful shape. Never came back—there can’t be more’n 300 or 400 people living there now.
“But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice—and I don’t say I’m 
blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn’t care to go to their 
town. I s’pose you know—though I can see you’re a Westerner by your talk—what a lot our New England 
ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, 
and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ’em. You’ve probably heard about 
the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there’s still a bunch of 
Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod. “Well, there must be something like that back of 
the Innsmouth people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes 
and creeks, and we can’t be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it’s pretty clear that 
old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships 
in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the 
Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice 
a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses 
and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and 
scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very 
young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap 
of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em—they used to have 
lots of horse trouble before autos came in. “Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich 
will have anything to do with ’em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come 
to town or when anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off 
Innsmouth Harbour when there ain’t any anywhere else around—but just try to fish there yourself 
and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad—walking 
and taking the train at Rowley after the branch was dropped—but now they use that bus.
“Yes, there’s a hotel in Innsmouth—called the Gilman House—but I don’t believe it can amount 
to much. I wouldn’t advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten o’clock bus 
tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at eight o’clock. There 
was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago, and he had a lot 
of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard 
voices in other rooms—though most of ’em was empty—that gave him the shivers. It was foreign 
talk, he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes 
spoke. It sounded so unnatural—slopping-like, he said—that he didn’t dare undress and go to 
sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the morning. The talk went on most all night.
“This fellow—Casey, his name was—had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folks watched him and 
seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place—it’s in an old mill on the 
lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I’d heard. Books in bad shape, and 
no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it’s always ben a kind of mystery where the 
Marshes get the gold they refine. They’ve never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years 
ago they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots. “Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of 
jewellery that the sailors and refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once 
or twice on some of the Marsh womenfolks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in 
some heathen port, especially since he was always ordering stacks of glass beads and trinkets such 
as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still think he’d found an 
old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here’s a funny thing. The old Captain’s ben dead these 
sixty years, and there ain’t ben a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but 
just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things—mostly glass and 
rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like ’em to look at themselves—Gawd 
knows they’ve gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.
“That plague of ’46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they’re a 
doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and the other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, 
there probably ain’t more’n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say 
there are. I guess they’re what they call ‘white trash’ down South—lawless and sly, and full 
of secret doings. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how 
the fish swarm right there and nowhere else. “Nobody can ever keep track of these people, 
and state school officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying 
strangers ain’t welcome around Innsmouth. I’ve heard personally of more’n one business 
or government man that’s disappeared there, and there’s loose talk of one who went crazy 
and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.
“That’s why I wouldn’t go at night if I was you. I’ve never ben there and have no wish to go, 
but I guess a daytime trip couldn’t hurt you—even though the people hereabouts will advise you 
not to make it. If you’re just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth 
ought to be quite a place for you.” And so I spent part of that evening at the 
Newburyport Public Library looking up data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question 
the natives in the shops, the lunch room, the garages, and the fire station, I had 
found them even harder to get started than the ticket-agent had predicted; and realised 
that I could not spare the time to overcome their first instinctive reticences. They had a 
kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in 
Innsmouth. At the Y.M.C.A., where I was stopping, the clerk merely discouraged my going to such 
a dismal, decadent place; and the people at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, 
in the eyes of the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.
The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except that the 
town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great marine 
prosperity in the early nineteenth century, and later a minor factory centre using the 
Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if 
they formed a discredit to the county. References to decline were few, though 
the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial 
life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only 
remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less 
as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was 
never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was 
some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had 
been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion. Most interesting of all was a glancing reference 
to the strange jewellery vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed 
the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum 
of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical 
Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted 
to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative 
that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour 
I resolved to see the local sample—said to be a large, queerly proportioned thing evidently meant 
for a tiara—if it could possibly be arranged. The librarian gave me a note of introduction to 
the curator of the Society, a Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief 
explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into the closed 
building, since the hour was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one indeed, 
but in my present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a 
corner cupboard under the electric lights. It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty 
to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy 
that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, 
though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, 
and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost 
freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter 
lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable 
metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the 
striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs—some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine—chased 
or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.
The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a curiously 
disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was the 
queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen 
either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic 
defiances of every recognised stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled 
technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from 
any—Eastern or Western, ancient or modern—which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was 
as if the workmanship were that of another planet. However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a 
second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestions of 
the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time 
and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these 
reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity—half ichthyic and 
half batrachian in suggestion—which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting 
and uncomfortable sense of pseudo-memory, as if they called up some image from deep 
cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At 
times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the 
ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil. In odd contrast to the tiara’s aspect was its 
brief and prosy history as related by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum 
at a shop in State Street in 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a 
brawl. The Society had acquired it directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display 
worthy of its quality. It was labelled as of probable East-Indian or Indo-Chinese provenance, 
though the attribution was frankly tentative. Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses 
regarding its origin and its presence in New England, was inclined to believe that it formed 
part of some exotic pirate hoard discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely not 
weakened by the insistent offers of purchase at a high price which the Marshes began to 
make as soon as they knew of its presence, and which they repeated to this day despite the 
Society’s unvarying determination not to sell. As the good lady shewed me out of the building she 
made it clear that the pirate theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent 
people of the region. Her own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth—which she had never seen—was 
one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that the 
rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force 
there and engulfed all the orthodox churches. It was called, she said, “The Esoteric Order 
of Dagon”, and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a 
century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. 
Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and 
permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence 
on the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the 
old Masonic Hall on New Church Green. All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed 
an excellent reason for shunning the ancient town of decay and desolation; but to 
me it was merely a fresh incentive. To my architectural and historical anticipations 
was now added an acute anthropological zeal, and I could scarcely sleep in my small 
room at the “Y” as the night wore away. Shortly before ten the next morning I stood 
with one small valise in front of Hammond’s Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the 
Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to 
other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had 
not exaggerated the dislike which local people bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few 
moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, 
made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; 
a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield—“Arkham-Innsmouth-Newb’port”—soon 
verified. There were only three passengers—dark, unkempt men 
of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast—and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled 
out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, 
and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must 
be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread 
over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly 
struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven 
by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine 
the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet 
tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed grey golf cap. His age was 
perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when 
one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes 
that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped 
ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless 
except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and 
in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His 
hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were 
strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl 
closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling 
gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I 
wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them. A certain greasiness about the fellow increased 
my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried 
with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could 
not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, 
or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of 
biological degeneration rather than alienage. I was sorry when I saw that there would be 
no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with 
this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed 
the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word “Innsmouth”. He looked 
curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far 
behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle started with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick 
buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people 
on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus—or 
at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, 
where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still 
older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into 
a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country. The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of 
sand, sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and more desolate as we proceeded. Out 
the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently 
drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley 
and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that 
traffic was very light hereabouts. The small, weather-worn telephone poles carried only two 
wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland 
and promoted the general isolation of the region. Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and 
crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in 
one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly settled countryside. 
The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of 1846, and was thought 
by simple folk to have a dark connexion with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by 
the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of its best protection 
and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand. At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the 
vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I 
felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted roadway 
met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth 
altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the 
sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver’s bent, rigid back and narrow head became 
more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless 
as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet 
joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head 
and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far, misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy 
profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for 
the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realised, 
come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth. It was a town of wide extent and dense 
construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of 
chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and 
unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and 
another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of 
sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, 
and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. 
There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed “widow’s 
walks”. These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately 
sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the 
abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines 
of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich. The decay was worst close to the waterfront, 
though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well-preserved brick structure 
which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an 
ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated 
fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A 
sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier, and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored 
dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out 
past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater’s end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, 
those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed 
a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent 
malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning 
seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone 
more disturbing than the primary impression. We met no one on the road, but presently 
began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited 
houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered 
yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the 
fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown 
doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost 
every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without 
being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested 
some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; 
but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly. As the bus reached a lower level I began to 
catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness. The leaning, unpainted 
houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did 
those we were leaving behind. The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in 
spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly 
existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown 
chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was 
the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable. Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; 
those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the 
right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there 
now came signs of a sparse habitation—curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered 
motor-car at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well defined, and though most of the 
houses were quite old—wood and brick structures of the early nineteenth century—they were obviously 
kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my 
feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly 
disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches 
on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at 
a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure’s once white paint was now 
grey and peeling, and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with 
difficulty make out the words “Esoteric Order of Dagon”. This, then, was the former Masonic 
Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice 
was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned 
to look out the window on my side of the coach. The sound came from a squat-towered stone church 
of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having 
a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its 
clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were telling 
the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image 
of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really 
was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And 
as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into 
my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis 
could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it. It was a living object—the first except the driver 
that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town—and had I been in a steadier mood 
I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it 
was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon 
had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first 
subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; 
an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shewn me the previous evening. This, 
acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and 
robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt 
that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should 
adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in 
some strange way—perhaps as treasure-trove? A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking 
youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks—lone individuals, and silent knots of 
two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy 
signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became 
more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, 
iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I 
looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part 
way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls 
upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise 
was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew 
up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola-crowned building with remnants of 
yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the 
shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight—an elderly man without what I had come to 
call the “Innsmouth look”—and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; 
remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the 
square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a 
semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several 
streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and 
small—all low-powered incandescents—and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, 
even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included 
perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National 
chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer’s office, and still 
another, at the eastern extremity of the square near the river, an office of the town’s 
only industry—the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or 
five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was 
the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which 
rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the 
opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel 
was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and 
was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed 
exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, 
or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, 
boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back home whenever he got a moment off. 
His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there 
and he did not wish to give up his job. There was, he said, no public library or chamber 
of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down 
was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets—Broad, Washington, Lafayette, 
and Adams—and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums—along Main Street—that 
I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would 
be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods—especially north of 
the river—since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One 
must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used 
churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches 
were very odd—all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, 
and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their 
creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvellous transformations 
leading to bodily immortality—of a sort—on this earth. The youth’s own pastor—Dr. Wallace 
of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham—had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people—the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive 
and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed 
the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps—judging from the quantities 
of bootleg liquor they consumed—they lay for most of the daylight hours in an 
alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship 
and understanding—despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of 
entity. Their appearance—especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut—was 
certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting 
in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell 
twice a year on April 30th and October 31st. They were very fond of the water, and swam a great 
deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in 
sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was 
generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt 
to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace 
of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older 
folk, and whether the “Innsmouth look” were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon 
which increased its hold as years advanced. Only a very rare affliction, of course, 
could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after 
maturity—changes involving osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull—but then, 
even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of 
the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions 
regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter 
how long one might live in Innsmouth. The youth was certain that many specimens 
even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People 
sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the 
river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen 
abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood—if any—these beings had, it was impossible to tell. 
They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government agents 
and others from the outside world came to town. It would be of no use, my informant said, 
to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but 
normal-looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time 
walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was ninety-six 
years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, 
furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when 
sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to 
resist any offer of his favourite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most 
astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence. After all, though, little useful data could 
be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible 
marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever 
believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was 
not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest 
popular whispers and delusions were derived. Several non-native residents had reported 
monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok’s tales and the malformed 
denizens it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed 
out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. 
Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark. As for business—the abundance of 
fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less 
advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course 
the town’s real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square 
only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes 
went to the works in a closed, curtained car. There were all sorts of rumours about how Marsh 
had come to look. He had once been a great dandy, and people said he still wore the frock-coated 
finery of the Edwardian age, curiously adapted to certain deformities. His sons had formerly 
conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal 
and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come 
to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess 
of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara 
belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from 
some secret hoard, either of pirates or of daemons. The clergymen—or priests, or whatever 
they were called nowadays—also wore this kind of ornament as a head-dress; but one seldom 
caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were 
rumoured to exist around Innsmouth. The Marshes, together with the other three gently 
bred families of the town—the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots—were all very retiring. They 
lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour 
in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and 
whose deaths had been reported and recorded. Warning me that many of the street signs were 
down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town’s 
salient features. After a moment’s study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed 
it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a 
fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My programme, I 
decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, 
and catch the eight o’clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant 
and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious 
observations to the field of architecture. Thus I began my systematic though 
half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth’s narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and 
turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which 
seemed oddly free from the noise of industry. This building stood on the steep river bluff near 
a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic centre, displaced 
after the Revolution by the present Town Square. Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, 
I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel 
roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of 
an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. 
Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned 
at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows 
stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the 
terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses 
multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed 
vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given 
over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that 
not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse. Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it 
differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost 
its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing 
did I see, except for the scattered fishermen on the distant breakwater, and not a sound did I 
hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was 
getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over 
the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life—active fish-packing houses in Water Street, 
smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and 
infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes—but I seemed to find this even 
more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and 
abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded 
of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in 
the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland—unless, indeed, the “Innsmouth look” 
were a disease rather than a blood strain, in which case this district might be 
held to harbour the more advanced cases. One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of 
the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited 
houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were 
creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the 
hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what 
the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, 
and was unaccountably anxious not to do so. Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but 
ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. 
My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to 
repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of 
that strangely diademed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that the 
churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street 
safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern 
Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced 
and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed 
my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in 
each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five 
in excellent repair and with finely tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these—with wide 
terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street—I took to be the home of 
Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner. In all these streets no living thing was visible, 
and I wondered at the complete absense of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which 
puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered 
condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal 
in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being 
watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too 
well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street 
toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins 
of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered 
railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right. The uncertain bridge now before 
me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the 
south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically 
in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly 
becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting 
some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red-faced, 
bushy-bearded, watery-eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front 
of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal-looking firemen. This, of course, 
must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and 
its shadow were so hideous and incredible. It must have been some imp of the 
perverse—or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources—which made me change my plans 
as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and 
I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of 
this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in 
my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly. I had been assured that the old man could 
do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the 
natives made it unsafe to be seen talking to him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town’s 
decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no 
amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often 
merely symbols or allegories based upon truth—and old Zadok must have seen everything which went 
on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, 
and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from 
the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. 
Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery 
boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, 
and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth said that 
he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of 
a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited 
on me had a touch of the staring “Innsmouth look”, but was quite civil in his way; being 
perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers—truckmen, gold-buyers, 
and the like—as were occasionally in town. Reëntering the Square I saw that luck was 
with me; for—shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House—I 
glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In 
accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly purchased bottle; and soon 
realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way 
to the most deserted region I could think of. I was steering my course by the 
map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch 
of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had 
been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get 
beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to 
question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear 
a faint and wheezy “Hey, Mister!” behind me, and I presently allowed the old man to catch up 
and take copious pulls from the quart bottle. I began putting out feelers as we walked along 
to Water Street and turned southward amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted 
ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At 
length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the 
weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones 
near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a 
ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought, was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; 
so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. 
The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; 
but I was resolved to let nothing deter me. About four hours remained for conversation if I 
were to catch the eight o’clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the 
ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful 
not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok’s vinous garrulousness to pass into a 
stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my 
disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He 
would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency 
to philosophise in a sententious village fashion. Toward the end of the second hour I feared 
my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I 
had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening 
which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient’s rambling took a 
turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling 
sea, but he was facing it, and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light 
on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then shewing plainly and almost fascinatingly above 
the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended 
in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and 
hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken. “Thar’s whar it all begun—that cursed 
place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o’ hell—sheer drop daown 
to a bottom no saoundin’-line kin tech. Ol’ Cap’n Obed done it—him that faound aout more’n 
was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands. “Everybody was in a bad way 
them days. Trade fallin’ off, mills losin’ business—even the new ones—an’ 
the best of our menfolks kilt a-privateerin’ in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy 
brig an’ the Ranger snow—both of ’em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships 
afloat—brigantine Columby, brig Hetty, an’ barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as 
kep’ on with the East-Injy an’ Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin’s barkentine Malay 
Pride made a venter as late as ’twenty-eight. “Never was nobody like Cap’n Obed—old limb o’ 
Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin’ abaout furren parts, an’ callin’ all the folks 
stupid fer goin’ to Christian meetin’ an’ bearin’ their burdens meek an’ lowly. Says 
they’d orter git better gods like some o’ the folks in the Injies—gods as ud bring ’em 
good fishin’ in return for their sacrifices, an’ ud reely answer folks’s prayers.
“Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot, too, only he was agin’ folks’s doin’ any heathen 
things. Told abaout an island east of Otaheité whar they was a lot o’ stone ruins older’n anybody 
knew anything abaout, kind o’ like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carvin’s of faces that 
looked like the big statues on Easter Island. They was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar 
they was other ruins with diff’rent carvin’s—ruins all wore away like they’d ben under the sea onct, 
an’ with picters of awful monsters all over ’em. “Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound 
thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an’ sported bracelets an’ armlets an’ head rigs 
made aout of a queer kind o’ gold an’ covered with picters o’ monsters jest like the ones carved over 
the ruins on the little island—sorter fish-like frogs or frog-like fishes that was drawed in all 
kinds o’ positions like they was human bein’s. Nobody cud git aout o’ them whar they got all the 
stuff, an’ all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the 
very next islands had lean pickin’s. Matt he got to wonderin’ too, an’ so did Cap’n Obed. Obed 
he notices, besides, that lots of the han’some young folks ud drop aout o’ sight fer good from 
year to year, an’ that they wa’n’t many old folks araound. Also, he thinks some of the 
folks looks durned queer even fer Kanakys. “It took Obed to git the truth aout o’ them 
heathen. I dun’t know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin’ fer the gold-like things they 
wore. Ast ’em whar they come from, an’ ef they cud git more, an’ finally wormed the story aout 
o’ the old chief—Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, 
but the Cap’n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when 
I tell ’em, an’ I dun’t s’pose you will, young feller—though come to look at ye, ye hev kind 
o’ got them sharp-readin’ eyes like Obed had.” The old man’s whisper grew fainter, 
and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of 
his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
“Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they’s things on this arth as most folks never heerd abaout—an’ 
wouldn’t believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin’ heaps o’ their young men 
an’ maidens to some kind o’ god-things that lived under the sea, an’ gittin’ all kinds o’ favour in 
return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an’ it seems them awful 
picters o’ frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o’ these things. Mebbe they was 
the kind o’ critters as got all the mermaid stories an’ sech started. They had all kinds 
o’ cities on the sea-bottom, an’ this island was heaved up from thar. Seems they was some of 
the things alive in the stone buildin’s when the island come up sudden to the surface. That’s 
haow the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein’ 
skeert, an’ pieced up a bargain afore long. “Them things liked human sacrifices. Had 
had ’em ages afore, but lost track o’ the upper world arter a time. What they done 
to the victims it ain’t fer me to say, an’ I guess Obed wa’n’t none too sharp abaout 
askin’. But it was all right with the heathens, because they’d ben havin’ a hard time an’ was 
desp’rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o’ young folks to the sea-things twict 
every year—May-Eve an’ Hallowe’en—reg’lar as cud be. Also give some o’ the carved knick-knacks they 
made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty o’ fish—they druv ’em in from all over 
the sea—an’ a few gold-like things naow an’ then. “Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on 
the little volcanic islet—goin’ thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet’ry, and bringin’ back 
any of the gold-like jools as was comin’ to ’em. At fust the things didn’t never go onto the 
main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin’ with 
the folks, an’ havin’ j’int ceremonies on the big days—May-Eve an’ Hallowe’en. Ye see, they was 
able to live both in an’ aout o’ water—what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told ’em as 
haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe ’em aout ef they got wind o’ their bein’ thar, 
but they says they dun’t keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o’ humans ef they 
was willin’ to bother—that is, any as didn’t hev sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old 
Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin’ to bother, they’d lay low when anybody visited the island.
“When it come to matin’ with them toad-lookin’ fishes, the Kanakys kind o’ balked, but finally 
they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind 
o’ relation to sech water-beasts—that everything alive come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs 
a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there’d be 
children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d 
take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, 
young feller—them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die. Them 
things never died excep’ they was kilt violent. “Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them 
islanders they was all full o’ fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an’ 
begun to shew it, they was kep’ hid until they felt like takin’ to the water an’ quittin’ the 
place. Some was more teched than others, an’ some never did change quite enough to take to the 
water; but mostly they turned aout jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the 
things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past 
seventy, though they’d usually go daown under fer trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the 
water gen’rally come back a good deal to visit, so’s a man ud often be a-talkin’ to his own 
five-times-great-grandfather, who’d left the dry land a couple o’ hundred years or so afore.
“Everybody got aout o’ the idee o’ dyin’—excep’ in canoe wars with the other islanders, or 
as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snake-bite or plague or sharp gallopin’ 
ailments or somethin’ afore they cud take to the water—but simply looked forrad to a kind o’ 
change that wa’n’t a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they’d got was well wuth 
all they’d had to give up—an’ I guess Obed kind o’ come to think the same hisself when he’d 
chewed over old Walakea’s story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn’t got none 
of the fish blood—bein’ of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.
“Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o’ rites an’ incantations as had to do with the sea-things, 
an’ let him see some o’ the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow 
or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg’lar things from right aout o’ the 
water. In the end he give him a funny kind o’ thingumajig made aout o’ lead or something, 
that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest 
of ’em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o’ prayers an’ sech. Walakea allaowed 
as the things was scattered all over the world, so’s anybody that looked abaout cud find a 
nest an’ bring ’em up ef they was wanted. “Matt he didn’t like this business at all, an’ 
wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap’n was sharp fer gain, an’ faound he 
cud git them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of ’em. Things went on 
that way fer years, an’ Obed got enough o’ that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery 
in Waite’s old run-daown fullin’ mill. He didn’t dass sell the pieces like they was, fer folks ud 
be all the time askin’ questions. All the same his crews ud git a piece an’ dispose of it naow and 
then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an’ he let his women-folks wear some o’ the 
pieces as was more human-like than most. “Wal, come abaout ’thutty-eight—when I was seven 
year’ old—Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v’yages. Seems the other 
islanders had got wind o’ what was goin’ on, an’ had took matters into their own hands. S’pose 
they musta had, arter all, them old magic signs as the sea-things says was the only things they was 
afeard of. No tellin’ what any o’ them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom 
throws up some island with ruins older’n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was—they didn’t leave 
nothin’ standin’ on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep’ what parts of the 
ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout—like 
charms—with somethin’ on ’em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob’ly them was the Old 
Ones’ signs. Folks all wiped aout, no trace o’ no gold-like things, an’ none o’ the nearby Kanakys 
ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn’t even admit they’d ever ben any people on that island.
“That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein’ as his normal trade was doin’ very 
poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarin’ days what profited the master 
of a ship gen’lly profited the crew proportionate. Most o’ the folks araound the taown took the hard 
times kind o’ sheep-like an’ resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin’ was peterin’ 
aout an’ the mills wa’n’t doin’ none too well. “Then’s the time Obed he begun a-cursin’ at 
the folks fer bein’ dull sheep an’ prayin’ to a Christian heaven as didn’t help ’em none. He 
told ’em he’d knowed of folks as prayed to gods that give somethin’ ye reely need, an’ says ef a 
good bunch o’ men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe git a holt o’ sarten paowers as ud bring plenty 
o’ fish an’ quite a bit o’ gold. O’ course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen an’ seed the island 
knowed what he meant, an’ wa’n’t none too anxious to git clost to sea-things like they’d heerd tell 
on, but them as didn’t know what ’twas all abaout got kind o’ swayed by what Obed had to say, an’ 
begun to ast him what he cud do to set ’em on the way to the faith as ud bring ’em results.”
Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing 
nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black 
reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish 
the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied 
there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangenesses of 
Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. 
Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the 
less the account held a hint of genuine terror, if only because it brought in references to 
strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments 
had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone 
Obed himself rather than of this antique toper. I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained 
it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even 
a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle 
and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close 
to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained, 
bushy whiskers. Yes—he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
“Poor Matt—Matt he allus was agin’ it—tried to line up the folks on his side, an’ had long 
talks with the preachers—no use—they run the Congregational parson aout o’ taown, an’ the 
Methodist feller quit—never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin—Wrath o’ 
Jehovy—I was a mighty little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an’ seen what I seen—Dagon an’ 
Ashtoreth—Belial an’ Beëlzebub—Golden Caff an’ the idols o’ Canaan an’ the Philistines—Babylonish 
abominations—Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin—” He stopped again, and from the look in his watery 
blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder 
he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
“Dun’t believe me, hey? Heh, heh, heh—then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap’n Obed an’ twenty 
odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o’ night an’ chant things so laoud ye 
cud hear ’em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An’ tell me why Obed was 
allus droppin’ heavy things daown into the deep water t’other side o’ the reef whar the bottom 
shoots daown like a cliff lower’n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped 
lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An’ what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an’ 
agin the next Hallowe’en? An’ why’d the new church parsons—fellers as used to be sailors—wear 
them queer robes an’ cover theirselves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?”
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled 
electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he had begun to cackle evilly.
“Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin’ to see, hey? Mebbe ye’d like to a ben me in them days, 
when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o’ my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye, 
little pitchers hev big ears, an’ I wa’n’t missin’ nothin’ o’ what was gossiped abaout Cap’n Obed an’ 
the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa’s ship’s glass up 
to the cupalo an’ seed the reef a-bristlin’ thick with shapes that dove off quick soon’s the moon 
riz? Obed an’ the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water 
an’ never come up . Haow’d ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupalo a-watchin’ shapes as 
wa’n’t human shapes? Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh .” The old man was getting hysterical, and I began 
to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that 
its shaking was not altogether that of mirth. “S’pose one night ye seed somethin’ heavy 
heaved offen Obed’s dory beyond the reef, an’ then larned nex’ day a young feller 
was missin’ from home? Hey? Did anybody ever see hide or hair o’ Hiram Gilman agin? 
Did they? An’ Nick Pierce, an’ Luelly Waite, an’ Adoniram Saouthwick, an’ Henry Garrison? 
Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh . Shapes talkin’ sign language with their hands them as had reel hands .
“Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters 
a-wearin’ gold-like things as nobody’d never see on ’em afore, an’ smoke started comin’ aout o’ 
the refin’ry chimbly. Other folks were prosp’rin’, too—fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit 
to kill, an’ heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb’ryport, Arkham, 
an’ Boston. ’Twas then Obed got the ol’ branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen 
heerd abaout the ketch an’ come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see ’em agin. 
An’ jest then our folks organised the Esoteric Order o’ Dagon, an’ bought Masonic Hall offen 
Calvary Commandery for it heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an’ agin’ the sellin’, 
but he dropped aout o’ sight jest then. “Remember, I ain’t sayin’ Obed was set on hevin’ 
things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun’t think he aimed at fust to do no mixin’, 
nor raise no younguns to take to the water an’ turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted 
them gold things, an’ was willin’ to pay heavy, an’ I guess the others was satisfied fer a while .
“Come in ’forty-six the taown done some lookin’ an’ thinkin’ fer itself. Too many folks 
missin’—too much wild preachin’ at meetin’ of a Sunday—too much talk abaout that reef. I 
guess I done a bit by tellin’ Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one 
night as follered Obed’s craowd aout to the reef, an’ I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex’ 
day Obed an’ thutty-two others was in gaol, with everbody a-wonderin’ jest what was afoot an’ 
jest what charge agin’ ’em cud be got to holt. God, ef anybody’d look’d ahead a 
couple o’ weeks later, when nothin’ had ben throwed into the sea fer that long .”
Zadok was shewing signs of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though 
glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of 
the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not 
be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers. “That awful night I seed ’em I was up in the 
cupalo hordes of ’em swarms of ’em all over the reef an’ swimmin’ up the harbour into the 
Manuxet . God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night they rattled our door, but 
pa wouldn’t open then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selectman Mowry 
an’ see what he cud do . Maounds o’ the dead an’ the dyin’ shots an’ screams shaoutin’ in Ol’ 
Squar an’ Taown Squar an’ New Church Green gaol throwed open proclamation treason called it 
the plague when folks come in an’ faound haff our people missin’ nobody left but them as ud 
jine in with Obed an’ them things or else keep quiet never heerd o’ my pa no more .”
The old man was panting, and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
“Everything cleaned up in the mornin’—but they was traces . Obed he kinder takes charge an’ says 
things is goin’ to be changed others’ll worship with us at meetin’-time, an’ sarten haouses hez 
got to entertain guests they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an’ he fer one 
didn’t feel baound to stop ’em. Far gone, was Obed jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. 
He says they brung us fish an’ treasure, an’ shud hev what they hankered arter .
“Nothin’ was to be diff’runt on the aoutside, only we was to keep shy o’ strangers ef we knowed 
what was good fer us. We all hed to take the Oath o’ Dagon, an’ later on they was secon’ an’ 
third Oaths that some on us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards—gold an’ 
sech— No use balkin’, fer they was millions of ’em daown thar. They’d ruther not start risin’ 
an’ wipin’ aout humankind, but ef they was gave away an’ forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest 
that. We didn’t hev them old charms to cut ’em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an’ them 
Kanakys wudn’t never give away their secrets. “Yield up enough sacrifices an’ savage 
knick-knacks an’ harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an’ they’d let well enough 
alone. Wudn’t bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside—that is, withaout they got pryin’. 
All in the band of the faithful—Order o’ Dagon—an’ the children shud never die, but go back to the 
Mother Hydra an’ Father Dagon what we all come from onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui 
mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn—” Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark 
raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul—to what pitiful depths of hallucination 
had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that 
fertile, imaginative brain! He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled 
cheeks into the depths of his beard. “God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year’ 
old—Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!—the folks as was missin’, an’ them as kilt theirselves—them as 
told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you’re a-callin’ 
me right naow—but God, what I seen— They’d a kilt me long ago fer what I know, only I’d took 
the fust an’ secon’ Oaths o’ Dagon offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of ’em proved 
I told things knowin’ an’ delib’rit but I wudn’t take the third Oath—I’d a died ruther’n take that—
“It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct ’forty-six begun to grow up—some of 
’em, that is. I was afeard—never did no pryin’ arter that awful night, an’ never see one 
of—them—clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, 
an’ ef I’d a had any guts or sense I’d a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks 
wrote me things wa’n’t so bad. That, I s’pose, was because gov’munt draft men was in taown 
arter ’sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off—mills 
an’ shops shet daown—shippin’ stopped an’ the harbour choked up—railrud give up—but they 
they never stopped swimmin’ in an’ aout o’ the river from that cursed reef o’ Satan—an’ 
more an’ more attic winders got a-boarded up, an’ more an’ more noises was heerd in haouses 
as wa’n’t s’posed to hev nobody in ’em . “Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout 
us—s’pose you’ve heerd a plenty on ’em, seein’ what questions ye ast—stories 
abaout things they’ve seed naow an’ then, an’ abaout that queer joolry as still comes in 
from somewhars an’ ain’t quite all melted up—but nothin’ never gits def’nite. Nobody’ll believe 
nothin’. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an’ allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren 
blood or is distempered or somethin’. Besides, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers 
as they kin, an’ encourage the rest not to git very cur’ous, specially raound night time. 
Beasts balk at the critters—hosses wuss’n mules—but when they got autos that was all right.
“In ’forty-six Cap’n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see—some says he didn’t 
want to, but was made to by them as he’d called in—had three children by her—two as disappeared 
young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an’ was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her 
married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn’t suspect nothin’. But nobody aoutside’ll hev 
nothin’ to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin’ry naow is Obed’s 
grandson by his fust wife—son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another 
o’ them as wa’n’t never seed aoutdoors. “Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can’t shet 
his eyes no more, an’ is all aout o’ shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he’ll take to the 
water soon. Mebbe he’s tried it already—they do sometimes go daown fer little spells afore 
they go fer good. Ain’t ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year’. Dun’t know haow 
his poor wife kin feel—she come from Ipswich, an’ they nigh lynched Barnabas when he 
courted her fifty odd year’ ago. Obed he died in ’seventy-eight, an’ all the next 
gen’ration is gone naow—the fust wife’s children dead, an’ the rest God knows .”
The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed 
to change the old man’s mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause 
now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite 
the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his vague apprehensiveness. 
Zadok now grew shriller, and seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
“Hey, yew, why dun’t ye say somethin’? Haow’d ye like to be livin’ in a taown like 
this, with everything a-rottin’ an’ a-dyin’, an’ boarded-up monsters crawlin’ an’ bleatin’ 
an’ barkin’ an’ hoppin’ araoun’ black cellars an’ attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow’d ye like 
to hear the haowlin’ night arter night from the churches an’ Order o’ Dagon Hall, an’ know what’s 
doin’ part o’ the haowlin’? Haow’d ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve 
an’ Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man’s crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain’t the wust!”
Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.
“Curse ye, dun’t set thar a-starin’ at me with them eyes—I tell Obed Marsh he’s in hell, 
an’ hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh in hell, I says! Can’t git me—I hain’t done 
nothin’ nor told nobody nothin’— “Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even 
ef I hain’t told nobody nothin’ yet, I’m a-goin’ to naow! You jest set still an’ 
listen to me, boy—this is what I ain’t never told nobody . I says I didn’t do no pryin’ arter 
that night—but I faound things aout jest the same! “Yew want to know what the reel horror is, 
hey? Wal, it’s this—it ain’t what them fish devils hez done, but what they’re a-goin’ 
to do! They’re a-bringin’ things up aout o’ whar they come from into the taown—ben doin’ 
it fer years, an’ slackenin’ up lately. Them haouses north o’ the river betwixt Water an’ 
Main Streets is full of ’em—them devils an’ what they brung—an’ when they git ready . I say, 
when they git ready ever hear tell of a shoggoth? “Hey, d’ye hear me? I tell ye 
I know what them things be—I seen ’em one night when EH—AHHHH—AH! E’YAAHHHH .”
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man’s shriek almost made me faint. His 
eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while 
his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my 
shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of 
ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, 
and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching 
eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back—albeit as a trembling whisper.
“Git aout o’ here! Git aout o’ here! They seen us—git aout fer your life! 
Dun’t wait fer nothin’—they know naow— Run fer it—quick—aout o’ this taown—”
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosening masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the 
mad ancient’s whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream.
“E—YAAHHHH! YHAAAAAAA! ” Before I could recover my scattered wits he 
had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling 
northward around the ruined warehouse wall. I glanced back at the sea, but there was 
nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north 
there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen. I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left 
by this harrowing episode—an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. 
The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered 
and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok’s insane earnestness and horror had 
communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for 
the town and its blight of intangible shadow. Later I might sift the tale and extract 
some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The 
hour had grown perilously late—my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight—so I 
tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly 
through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I 
had checked my valise and would find my bus. Though the golden light of late afternoon gave 
the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help 
glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous 
and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by 
that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were 
architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, 
cover the necessary distance in a half-hour. Studying the grocery youth’s map and seeking a 
route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town 
Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, 
and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around 
the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at 
me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures 
would be my fellow-passengers on the coach. The bus, rather early, rattled in with three 
passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a 
few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and 
entered the hotel; while the passengers—the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that 
morning—shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a 
language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the same 
seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent reappeared and began mumbling 
in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness. I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had 
been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the 
bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor 
was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth, either to Arkham or elsewhere. 
Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make 
the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, 
and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus 
and reëntered the hotel lobby; where the sullen, queer-looking night clerk told me I could 
have Room 428 on next the top floor—large, but without running water—for a dollar.
Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid 
my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up 
three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My 
room, a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy 
courtyard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view 
of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of 
the corridor was a bathroom—a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, 
faint electric light, and musty wooden panelling around all the plumbing fixtures.
It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some 
sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since 
the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, 
narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably 
thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was of the counter type, and it 
relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of 
vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room 
at the Gilman; getting an evening paper and a flyspecked magazine from the evil-visaged 
clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk. As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble 
electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading 
I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to 
brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its 
borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and 
I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.
Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent 
about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants—not on that, nor on the face 
beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could 
not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the 
room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with 
the town’s general fishy odour and persistently focussed one’s fancy on death and decay.
Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. 
One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt 
it had become out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness 
I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes-press which seemed to be of the same size, 
judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general 
tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a 
handy three-in-one device including a screw-driver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted 
perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. 
Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in 
an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting 
rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten. I did not undress, but decided to read till I 
was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a 
pocket flashlight from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could 
read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I 
stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening 
for something—listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector’s 
story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried 
to read, but found that I made no progress. After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and 
corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning 
to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly 
furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at 
all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. 
Was this one of those inns where travellers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look 
of excessive prosperity. Or were the townsfolk really so resentful about curious visitors? 
Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavourable notice? 
It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings 
set me off speculating in this fashion—but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.
At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted 
hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed—coat, collar, shoes, 
and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly 
unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to 
rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking 
of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like 
a malign fulfilment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock 
on my hall door was being tried—cautiously, furtively, tentatively—with a key.
My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more 
tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, 
instinctively on my guard—and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever 
it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to 
immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. 
It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was 
all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder’s next move.
After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with 
a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, 
of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came 
another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a 
furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking 
went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition 
of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.
The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously 
fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first 
I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to 
be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel 
alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.
Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed 
in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, 
however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil 
movement was afoot on a large scale—just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with 
my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I 
could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper 
sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so 
little resemblance to recognised human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what 
the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.
Having filled my pockets with the flashlight’s aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the 
windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state’s safety regulations there 
was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a 
sheer three-story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick 
business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance 
from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in 
a room two doors from my own—in one case on the north and in the other case on the south—and 
my mind instantly set to work calculating what chances I had of making the transfer.
I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be 
heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, 
if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly built connecting doors 
of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a 
battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the 
rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I 
would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces 
became coördinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I 
reinforced by pushing the bureau against it—little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.
I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for any calamity. Even getting 
to another roof would not solve the problem, for there would then remain the task of reaching 
the ground and escaping from the town. One thing in my favour was the deserted and ruinous state 
of the abutting buildings, and the number of skylights gaping blackly open in each row.
Gathering from the grocery boy’s map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced 
first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, 
hence I saw—after drawing the bolt and finding other fastenings in place—it was not a favourable 
one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against 
it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north 
was hung to open away from me, and this—though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the 
other side—I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street 
and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and 
the adjacent or opposite buildings to Washington or Bates—or else emerge in Paine and edge 
around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and 
get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the 
fire station there might be open all night. As I thought of these things I looked out over 
the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not 
much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; 
abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. 
Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat, marshy terrain 
dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded countryside 
was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from 
my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.
I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and 
on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot 
had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed 
through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled 
sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.
For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous 
fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking 
was repeated—continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had 
come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of 
battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound 
of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin panelling 
with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I had 
expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.
Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those outside must have 
heard. Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering, while keys sounded ominously 
in the hall doors of the rooms on both sides of me. Rushing through the newly opened connexion, 
I succeeded in bolting the northerly hall door before the lock could be turned; but even as 
I did so I heard the hall door of the third room—the one from whose window I had hoped to 
reach the roof below—being tried with a pass-key. For an instant I felt absolute despair, since 
my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror 
swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed 
dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed 
automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and 
performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and—granting that 
fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room—bolt the hall door beyond 
before the lock could be turned from outside. Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve—for the 
connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was through, 
and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure 
took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned 
bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the 
two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with 
the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing 
in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, 
and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand. The northward connecting door was wide open, 
but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could 
do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side—pushing 
a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in 
front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield 
me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in 
this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defences. 
I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous pantings, gruntings, 
and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.
As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightful scurrying along 
the corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that the southward battering had 
ceased. Plainly, most of my opponents were about to concentrate against the feeble connecting door 
which they knew must open directly on me. Outside, the moon played on the ridgepole of 
the block below, and I saw that the jump would be desperately hazardous because 
of the steep surface on which I must land. Surveying the conditions, I chose the more 
southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner 
slope of the roof and make for the nearest skylight. Once inside one of the decrepit brick 
structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of 
yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street 
and slipping out of town toward the south. The clatter at the northerly connecting 
door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. 
Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. 
The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making 
good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies 
suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the 
shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the 
hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the 
shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting 
roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of 
the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and 
horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House. I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep 
roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the 
window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the 
north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, 
and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in 
the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a 
general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. 
The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty 
floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels. The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past 
minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight—after a 
hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably 
sound; and I raced down past a barn-like second story to the ground floor. The desolation 
was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall, at 
one end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading 
the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to 
the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard. The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I 
could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman 
House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly 
over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest 
as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw 
that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I 
groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.
For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was 
pouring—lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries 
in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realised to my relief 
that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through 
my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was 
abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, 
and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures 
spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from 
this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it 
without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an 
empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, 
I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was carefully 
closing the aperture in its original manner. I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment 
saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, 
however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering 
which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass 
were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street-lights were turned off, as is often the 
custom on strongly moonlit nights in unprosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the 
south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty 
of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.
I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after 
my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing 
unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer. At Bates Street I drew into a yawning 
vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and 
approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection 
of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery 
youth’s map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to 
evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility 
and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical 
shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one—or at least 
no pursuer of mine—would be there. Just how fully the pursuit was organised—and 
indeed, just what its purpose might be—I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity 
in the town, but I judged that the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. 
I would, of course, soon have to shift from Washington to some other southward street; for 
that party from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have left dust prints in that last old 
building, revealing how I had gained the street. The open space was, as I had expected, strongly 
moonlit; and I saw the remains of a park-like, iron-railed green in its centre. Fortunately no 
one was about, though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction 
of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the 
waterfront and commanding a long view out at sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it 
from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight. My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound 
arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken 
for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street’s 
end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it 
I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last thirty-four 
hours—legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of 
unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality. Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent 
flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind 
a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held 
in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters 
worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to 
the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could 
be nothing less than an answering signal. Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh 
how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping 
my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a 
seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved 
some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on 
that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean 
as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of 
those nameless, unexplainable beacons. It was then that the most horrible impression 
of all was borne in upon me—the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and set 
me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of 
that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the 
reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming 
inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception 
I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely 
to be expressed or consciously formulated. My frantic running ceased before I had covered a 
block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. 
There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal 
Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed—for if the southward highway were 
blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew 
into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before 
these pursuers came down the parallel street. A second reflection was less comforting. 
Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not 
following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan 
of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of 
Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the denizens could not have known what 
route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country 
away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of 
all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled—both from sheer hopelessness and from a 
rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour. Then I thought of the abandoned railway 
to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the 
northwest from the crumbling station on the edge of the river-gorge. There was just a chance that 
the townsfolk would not think of that; since its brier-choked desertion made it half-impassable, 
and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from 
my hotel window, and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably 
visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl 
inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, 
and there was nothing to do but try it. Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I 
once more consulted the grocery boy’s map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was 
how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street, 
then west to Lafayette—there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I 
had traversed—and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through 
Lafayette, Bates, Adams, and Bank Streets—the latter skirting the river-gorge—to the abandoned 
and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that 
I wished neither to re-cross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course 
along a cross street as broad as South. Starting once more, I crossed the street to 
the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. 
Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw 
a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington 
Street, I broke into a quiet dog-trot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the 
corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by 
curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.
In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I 
clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway 
as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate 
under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to 
detect a fresh distribution of the vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover 
beheld a motor-car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which 
there intersects both Babson and Lafayette. As I watched—choked by a sudden rise in the fishy 
odour after a short abatement—I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling 
in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that 
highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, 
and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure 
was so odd that it sent a chill through me—for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.
When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner 
into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be 
still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds 
far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was 
in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street—with its seaward view—and I had to nerve myself for 
the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not 
fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken 
my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.
When the view of the water again opened out—this time on my right—I was half-determined not to 
look at it at all. I could not, however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and 
imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half 
expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling 
in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, 
though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers 
were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the 
winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. 
Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, 
but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, 
now closed in again with maddening intensity. I had not quite crossed the street when I heard 
a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open 
space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them 
plainly only a block away—and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and 
the dog-like sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, 
with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure—robed and tiaraed—seemed 
to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen 
in the Gilman’s courtyard—the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures 
turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, 
shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, 
my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying 
their course—meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.
Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared 
blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into 
Bates Street, where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing 
signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I 
turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shock when a man reeled out of a 
black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a 
menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.
No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roar of the 
waterfalls quite drowned my footsteps. It was a long dog-trot to the ruined station, 
and the great brick warehouse walls around me seemed somehow more terrifying than the fronts of 
private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded station—or what was left of it—and made directly 
for the tracks that started from its farther end. The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and 
not more than half the ties had rotted away. Walking or running on such a surface 
was very difficult; but I did my best, and on the whole made very fair time. For some 
distance the line kept on along the gorge’s brink, but at length I reached the long covered bridge 
where it crossed the chasm at a dizzy height. The condition of this bridge would determine my 
next step. If humanly possible, I would use it; if not, I would have to risk more street wandering 
and take the nearest intact highway bridge. The vast, barn-like length of the old bridge 
gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet 
within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats 
that flapped past me. About half way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for 
a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.
I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks 
crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with 
less and less of Innsmouth’s abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers 
hindered me and cruelly tore my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me 
concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.
The marshy region began very shortly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where 
the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the 
line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of 
this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according 
to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer 
distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain 
that the railway itself was not patrolled. Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, 
but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal 
in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before 
the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested 
my notice and held me immobile for a second. What I saw—or fancied I saw—was a disturbing 
suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very 
large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was 
great, and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving 
column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. 
There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way—a suggestion of 
bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.
All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme 
Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront. I 
thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, 
as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely 
large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth. Whence could come the dense personnel of such 
a column as I now beheld? Did those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, 
uncatalogued, and unsuspected life? Or had some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of unknown 
outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were they? Why were they there? And if such a column of them 
was scouring the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other roads be likewise augmented?
I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that 
damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that 
it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now 
began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There 
was another sound, too—a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow 
called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly 
undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road. And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, 
so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut’s protection. It was here, I recalled, that 
the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something 
was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. 
Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking—though perhaps that would have been 
impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I 
felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front 
of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could 
not, except by a malign miracle, see me. All at once I began dreading to look at them as 
they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts 
about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth 
types—something one would not care to remember. The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises 
swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying, and barking without the least suggestion of 
human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far 
I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous—I 
could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till 
the sounds receded toward the west. The horde was very close now—the air foul with their hoarse 
snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly 
ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will power into the task of holding my eyelids down.
I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a 
nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, 
would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated 
under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have 
strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than 
one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs 
and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks 
in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like 
the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to 
make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible 
that even my latest fear is sheer delusion? But I must try to tell what I thought I saw 
that night under the mocking yellow moon—saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in 
plain sight in front of me as I crouched among the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. 
Of course my resolution to keep my eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure—for who could 
crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities of unknown source flopped noisomely 
past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away? I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I 
really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before. My other pursuers had 
been accursedly abnormal—so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal 
element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my 
eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew 
that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out 
and the road crossed the track—and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror 
that leering yellow moon might have to shew. It was the end, for whatever remains to 
me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence 
in the integrity of Nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined—nothing, even, 
that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal way—would 
be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw—or believe I 
saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. 
Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly 
seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?
And yet I saw them in a limitless stream—flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating—surging inhumanly 
through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And 
some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal and some were strangely robed 
and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and 
had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head .
I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white 
bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. 
Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with 
prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating 
gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two 
legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. 
Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades 
of expression which their staring faces lacked. But for all of their monstrousness they were 
not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be—for was not the memory of that 
evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless 
design—living and horrible—and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest 
in the black church basement had so fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It 
seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them—and certainly my momentary glimpse could 
have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful 
fit of fainting; the first I had ever had. It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me 
from my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead 
I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone. Innsmouth’s 
ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living 
creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, 
and told me that the hour was past noon. The reality of what I had been through was highly 
uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away 
from evil-shadowed Innsmouth—and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers 
of locomotion. Despite weakness, hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a 
long time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in 
the village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night 
train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; 
a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now 
familiar—and I wish, for normality’s sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness 
that is overtaking me—yet perhaps a greater horror—or a greater marvel—is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour—the 
scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare 
look for that piece of strange jewellery said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, 
however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to 
possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might 
have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there—Mr. E. Lapham 
Peabody—was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told 
him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James 
Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen. It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had 
been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother’s family 
was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable 
discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since 
the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an 
orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire—a cousin of the Essex County Marshes—but her education had 
been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston 
bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian’s name was unfamiliar to Arkham 
people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed his role by 
court appointment. The Frenchwoman—now long dead—was very taciturn, and there were those 
who said she could have told more than she did. But the most baffling thing was the inability of 
anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman—Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh—among the 
known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some 
Marsh of prominence—she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after 
her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother—her only child. Having formed 
some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that 
it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody’s suggestion that I had the 
true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and 
took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating 
from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next 
June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities—reminded of the bygone terror only 
by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my 
pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July—just a year after the Innsmouth 
experience—I spent a week with my late mother’s family in Cleveland; checking some of my new 
genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material 
in existence there, and seeing what kind of connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish the task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home 
had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never 
encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he 
came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and 
I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that 
she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot 
himself after a trip to New England—the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be 
recalled at the Arkham Historical Society. This uncle had resembled her, and I had never 
liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had 
given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and uncle Walter had not looked 
like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence—Walter’s 
son—had been an almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the 
permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once 
implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major 
cause of his mother’s death two years before. My grandfather and his widowed son Walter 
now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over 
it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. 
Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne 
material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of 
all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind 
of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and uncle Douglas had always 
disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably 
heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, 
but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind 
despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. 
It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it 
had not suggested before—something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe-deposit 
vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box 
of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was 
almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, 
and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking 
at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother’s 
French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would 
be quite safe to wear them in Europe. As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap 
the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of 
the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced the workmanship 
superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact 
material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a 
kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed 
my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my 
countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He 
seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece—the tiara—became visible, but I doubt 
if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought 
I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did 
was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension, nor do I know how 
much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown 
source whose husband lived in Arkham—and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by 
a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through a trick? What was it the ancient toper had 
muttered about the likeness of my eyes to Captain Obed’s? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me 
I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who—or what—then, was my 
great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily 
have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. 
And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer 
fancy on my part—sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my 
imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father 
secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In 
the winter of 1930–31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but 
increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before 
me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls 
with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with 
nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all—I was 
one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying 
monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples. There was much more than I could remember, but 
even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever 
I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of 
the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process 
told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced 
to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous 
affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are 
not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the 
background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously 
and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming 
to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas? One night I had a frightful dream in which I 
met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with 
gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with 
a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed—as those who take to the water change—and 
told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had 
leaped to a realm whose wonders—destined for him as well—he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This 
was to be my realm, too—I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who 
had lived since before man ever walked the earth. I met also that which had been her grandmother. 
For eighty thousand years Pth’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back 
after Obed Marsh was dead. Y’ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death 
into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even 
though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present 
they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great 
Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, 
and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing 
the upper-earth men’s death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream 
in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of 
screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost 
took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel 
queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in 
sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for 
the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in 
a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours 
await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall 
not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself! I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that 
Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall 
swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to 
Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall 
dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever. The truth about Innsmouth is far worse than 
the mind can bear, as the town’s horrors rise to the surface, reshaping both the narrator’s 
fate and his understanding of reality itself. The legacy of the Deep Ones cannot be 
denied—nor can the unholy bloodline that runs through the streets of the cursed town. Thank you for listening to The Shadow over 
Innsmouth. What do you think of the town’s dark secret—are we all just one step away 
from something monstrous, waiting beneath the surface? Share your thoughts below. And for more 
terrifying tales from the edge of the unknown, don’t forget to subscribe to Shadows of Weekend. 
Until next time, remember—some places are better left unexplored, for there are things beneath 
the water we are not meant to understand. In the chaos of scattered manuscripts, faded 
letters, and haunted dreams, a terrifying truth emerges—one that threatens to shatter the 
very foundation of reality. A monstrous being slumbers beneath the sea, its name whispered by 
cults, carved in ancient idols, and dreamt by the sensitive and the mad. That name is Cthulhu.
Welcome to Shadows of Weekend. Tonight, we uncover The Call of Cthulhu, perhaps the 
most iconic tale in Lovecraft’s mythos. It is not a story of heroes, but of dread—a creeping 
realization that the universe is vast, uncaring, and watched over by entities so ancient and 
powerful that sanity itself crumbles before them. Like, share, and subscribe as we follow 
the trail of Professor Angell and his nephew through madness, myth, and cosmic horror.
(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“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 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 of all sorts and kinds .”
—Algernon Blackwood. The Horror in Clay.

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.”
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 night-clothes, when 
waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for 
his slowness in recognising 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 23d, 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 his 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 scepticism 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 23d 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 cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing 
on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes 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 despatch 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 Hayti, 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 rumour 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.

The Tale of Inspector Legrasse. The older matters which had made the sculptor’s 
dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his 
long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines 
of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous 
syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a 
connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American 
Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as 
befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; 
and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the 
convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, 
was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for 
certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John 
Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the 
subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose 
origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the 
least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely 
professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been 
captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed 
voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could 
not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely 
more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from 
the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was 
to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help 
them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One 
sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense 
excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose 
utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and 
archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries 
and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was 
between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented 
a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a 
mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, 
narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, 
was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered 
with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat 
occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the 
front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod 
head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore 
paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, 
and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, 
and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type 
of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, 
its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent 
flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the 
base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s 
expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic 
kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct 
from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in 
which our world and our conceptions have no part. And yet, as the members severally shook their 
heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering 
who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and 
who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late 
William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no 
slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland 
and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up 
on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux 
whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness 
and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned 
only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the 
world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary 
rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken 
a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman 
letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had 
cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, 
the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some 
cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features 
of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting. This data, received with suspense and astonishment 
by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at 
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among 
the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as 
best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then 
followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both 
detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish 
rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the 
Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the 
word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among 
his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. 
This text, as given, ran something like this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead 
Cthulhu waits dreaming.” And now, in response to a general and urgent 
demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp 
worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It 
savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree 
of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp 
and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured 
descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which 
had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort 
than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent 
tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. 
There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; 
and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in 
the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they 
alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never 
came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a 
pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation 
a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the 
squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to 
cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible 
far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A 
reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest 
night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to 
advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen 
colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown 
and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, 
in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered 
that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They 
said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before 
even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. 
But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on 
the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very 
place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on 
through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities 
peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when 
the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves 
to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those 
nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised 
ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise 
in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: “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 orgy 
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 
with 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 fetichism 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 an 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 to 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. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not 
composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove 
it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world 
to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They 
no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great 
city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when 
the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from 
outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise 
prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think 
whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, 
but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, 
after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among 
them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great 
Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die 
till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to 
revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then 
mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws 
and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated 
Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the 
earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, 
must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something 
had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the 
waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, 
had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city 
would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, 
mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. 
But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of 
persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he 
curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid 
the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. 
It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. 
No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double 
meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they 
chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.” Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little 
bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, 
apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane 
University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the 
highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by 
the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although 
scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of 
those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the 
image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his 
possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably 
akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox. That my uncle was excited by the tale of the 
sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of 
what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the 
figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come 
in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau 
diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of 
the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of 
having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten 
and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the 
professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the 
extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, 
after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological 
notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor 
and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian 
imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed 
front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very 
shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and 
at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and 
authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he 
has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which 
Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me 
my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my 
uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason 
for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to 
draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of 
the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had 
influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me 
shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of 
this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves 
insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. 
That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism 
had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could 
possibly have received the weird impressions. He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic 
fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green 
stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the 
ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These 
words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in 
his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was 
sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of 
his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it 
had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I 
now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of 
a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was 
willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and 
wish him all the success his talent promises. The matter of the cult still remained to 
fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its 
origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that 
old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel 
prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. 
What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed 
confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on 
the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me 
an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still 
were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes 
and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell. One thing I began to suspect, and which I now 
fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street 
leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push 
from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in 
Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless 
and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have 
been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper 
inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I 
think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. 
Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

The Madness from the Sea. If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it 
will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray 
piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of 
my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 
18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly 
collecting material for my uncle’s research. I had largely given over my inquiries into what 
Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, 
New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the 
reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was 
caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney 
Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign 
parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with 
that which Legrasse had found in the swamp. Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious 
contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only 
moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging 
quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA Vigilant Arrives With Helpless 
Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow. The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from 
Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and 
disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th 
in S. Latitude 34° 21′, W. Longitude 152° 17′ with one living and one dead man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south 
of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict 
was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor 
in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The 
living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding 
whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College 
Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the 
yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern. This man, after recovering his senses, told 
an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian 
of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, 
which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was 
delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, 
in S. Latitude 49° 51′, W. Longitude 128° 34′, encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and 
evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. 
Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon 
the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s 
equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner 
began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy 
and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill 
them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and 
desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting. Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. 
Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen 
proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any 
reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a 
small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow 
died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of 
their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried 
to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on 
the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, 
died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. 
Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore 
an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose 
frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set 
sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent 
gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober 
and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at 
which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it 
started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it 
had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back 
the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six 
of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the 
vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult 
in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of 
dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns 
of events so carefully noted by my uncle? March 1st—our February 28th according to the 
International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome 
crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth 
poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had 
moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed 
on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed 
a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an 
architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm 
of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from 
the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, 
star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I 
tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors 
of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous 
menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul. That evening, after a day of hurried cabling 
and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month 
I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members 
who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special 
mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during 
which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned 
that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive 
questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his 
wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than 
he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the 
vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney 
Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish 
head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde 
Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and 
with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had 
noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous 
puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder 
of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the 
stars, and had brought Their images with Them.” Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had 
never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked 
at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of 
the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, 
which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as 
“Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of 
a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered 
my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting 
English that Gustaf Johansen was no more. He had not survived his return, said his wife, 
for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the 
public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in 
English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk 
through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window 
had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance 
could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to 
heart trouble and a weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror 
which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the 
widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle 
me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was 
a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall 
day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its 
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water 
against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but 
I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life 
in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath 
the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world 
whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, 
had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that 
earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that 
filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up 
by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and 
sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was 
some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, 
and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during 
the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht 
under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. 
Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy 
Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme 
terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind 
history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay 
great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles 
incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to 
the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not 
suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough! I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the 
hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the 
waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill 
myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon 
of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any 
sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of 
the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs 
with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every 
line of the mate’s frightened description. Without knowing what futurism is like, 
Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of 
describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles 
and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and 
impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests 
something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the 
dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions 
apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered 
slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun 
of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this 
sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive 
angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite 
than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the 
scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it 
proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away. It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed 
up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and 
looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. 
It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of 
the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay 
flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, 
the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground 
were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it 
delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably 
along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not 
after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, 
very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw 
that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and 
rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. 
In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the 
rules of matter and perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black with a darkness almost 
material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of 
the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its 
aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky 
on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, 
and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. 
Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and 
gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted 
outside air of that poison city of madness. Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out 
when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of 
pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for 
such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, 
and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What 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, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right 
again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done 
by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be 
any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as 
the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to 
the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t 
have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only 
Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous 
monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the 
shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and 
engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, 
she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not 
of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing 
ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the 
water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and 
went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the 
cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that 
the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate 
chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. 
There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and 
higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the 
unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came 
nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There 
was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a 
stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For 
an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a 
venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn 
was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as 
the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam. That was all. After that Johansen only brooded 
over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the 
laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, 
for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a 
gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through 
liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, 
and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all 
livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, 
bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus. Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the 
vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the 
Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death 
came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and 
the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, 
wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked 
upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of 
summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But 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 in that chasm of stone which has shielded 
him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over 
the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around 
idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within 
his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the 
end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the 
deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot 
think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before 
audacity and see that it meets no other eye. Cthulhu sleeps still in sunken R’lyeh, yet 
the world turns unaware of the ancient terror that stirs beneath. The scattered 
clues, the overlapping accounts, the rising tide of madness—all point to a 
single conclusion: mankind is not alone, and knowledge is not always a blessing.
Thank you for diving into The Call of Cthulhu with us. What do you believe—was 
this a tale of ancient superstition, or a glimpse into the true horror lurking just 
beyond the stars? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. For more journeys into the forgotten 
and the forbidden, don’t forget to subscribe to Shadows of Weekend. Until next time—ph’nglui 
mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.