THE CALL OF CTHULHU | HORROR BOOK | PDF DOWNLOAD ||
THIS BOOK IS SO INTERESTING TO READ,BECAUSE,THE WHOLE STORY CONTAIN HORRIBLE THINGS,SO PLEASE READ IT VERY CAREFUL.
INTRODUCTION:
The Call of Cthulhu
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Summer 1926
Published February 1928 in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 159-78, 287.
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shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity…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
I. 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 light into the peace and safety
of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at
strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland
optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of
forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream
of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case an old newspaper
item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish
this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so
hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too intented 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
great-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 great-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 showing to other eyes. It had been
locked and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal
ring which the professor carried 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 the papers and
collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species.
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