The Xothic Legend Cycle

THE following document is part of the Santiago County Police Homicide File G029-02. It was taken down in dictation by public stenographer R. A. Wallis from oral testimony voluntarily given under oath on the afternoon of March 29, 1929. Sheriff Homer Tate Watkins was the questioning officer; Patrolman Wilbur J. Barlow was the witness. The file was held in the "Open" section until six months after the above date, and since then has been filed under “Unsolved” in the County Criminal Courts Building, Santiago, California. We are grateful to the Public Prosecutor's Office of the state government for permission to include here this previously unpublished deposition.

Prefatory note attached to Document 2, Homicide File G029-02: The deposition herein filed as Document 2 was taken down by public stenographer R. A. Wallis from oral testimony voluntarily given under oath on the afternoon of March 29, 1929. Sheriff Homer Tate Watkins was questioning officer; Patrolman Wilbur J. Barlow, witness. This file is to be held in the “Open" section until six (6) months after the above date, and will then be filed under "Unsolved" in the Santiago County Criminal Courts Bldg., Santiago, California.

AS regards the murder of the night watchman, Emiliano Gonzalez, I know nothing for I was not present to witness the crime. But as to the death of the unknown intruder, who seems to have been some sort of Polynesian or Mongoloid mixed breed, I have much to say, for I saw it happen. But little of what I can tell you will be believed, I fear. It is all I can do to believe it myself, for all that I saw it with my own eyes.

Sheriff Watkins has apprised me of my right to keep silent or to have the lawyer of my choice present while I gave this testimony, but I have chosen to tell everything I know regarding these two deaths and the fire which enveloped the South Gallery, even if this sworn deposition should later be used as evidence against me. As I am innocent of all crimes except that of ignorance, I have nothing to fear.

My name is Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins. I am 29 years old, and I reside at 34 Mission Street, this city. For the past four years I have worked at the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities, first as a library clerk, then as Assistant to the Curator of the Manuscripts Collection of the Institute. My direct superior was Dr. Henry Stephenson Blaine; when he was unexpectedly taken ill, about seven months ago, the directors of the Institute requested me to fill the role of temporary Curator of Manuscripts until such time as Dr. Blaine should be well enough to resume his rightful duties.

Because everything I am going to reveal at this time has its genesis in Dr. Blaine’s unfortunate illness, and in certain events which preceded and were subsequent to that illness. I must begin my statement with what may seem to you officers to be irrelevant material. I am sorry to have to take up so much of your time, but it is imperative that you permit me to tell my story in my own way.

I.

TO anyone who knew him as well as I did, or who worked by his side day in and day out, it was distressingly obvious that Dr. Blaine's nervous breakdown had been impending for some time. His features, normally tranquil, became increasingly pallid and worn, as if he were suffering under great strain and tension during the months immediately preceding his mental collapse. The change was perhaps most visible in his manner, which was usually genial and affable; but more and more he seemed distracted, inattentive to his work, unaware of his surroundings. Many times I came upon him musing over a brown manila file folder he had recently begun keeping; he had never shown me the contents of this folder, but it was marked "Copeland Notes/Xothic Legend Cycle" in ink on the tab. It was not until much later that I gained any idea as to what this inscription referred.

Whenever I happened to interrupt his study of this particular file, he would start guiltily, eye me with something resembling suspicion, and at times abruptly ask what I was doing there. Then he would hurriedly stuff the file back in the bottom drawer of his desk—a drawer he always kept locked.

As I have said, there was no question in my mind that Dr. Blaine was suffering under enormous nervous strain, due to causes completely unknown to me. But it was not until that terrible night in August that I gained any notion of just how serious his condition actually was. Whenever I happened to inquire as to his health, he would set the question aside with some seemingly casual remark to the effect that he was "sleeping badly" or "had a lot on his mind these days." From time to time he complained of bad dreams. As his condition rapidly deteriorated, he did in fact display the signs of insomnia in his trembling hands, pale face, red-rimmed eyes, and lack of ability co concentrate.

Then, at 3 o'clock in the morning of August 4. 1928. he was admitted to the Psychiatric Emergency Ward of Mercy Hospital in a state of shock resembling catatonia. Dr. Robinson Dambler, the physician in charge of his case, said he seemed to be in a condition of complete nervous collapse. He appeared to have lost the power of coherent speech, repeating over and over again the meaningless and singularly bestial sounds. “Yugg ... Yugg ... Yugg." He resisted every attempt at communication, and, during the next two months or so, had to be held in continuous restraint, having made several frenzied attempts at self-mutilation. Early in October he was committed to Dunhill Sanitarium, under treatment by the renowned Dr. Harrington J. Colby, a distinguished specialist in nervous disorders of this type.

I wish I could convey to you how shocked and horrified I was at the news of his nervous breakdown. I profoundly admired and esteemed Dr. Blaine as an eminent scholar and a scientist of high repute in his field. Even more than this, I regarded him as my friend, despite the considerable difference in our ages.

As requested by the directors, I assumed temporary curatorship, and for some months was too deeply immersed in handling my double burden of work to inquire more than cursorily into his condition. I have to admit that during the several weeks immediately prior to his breakdown, Dr. Blaine had neglected his duties, and our files were in the most slovenly condition. We had been engaged in cataloguing items from the Copeland bequest, with an eye toward a public display of the art treasures recently bequeathed to us. The directors had most urgently wished to place the Copeland Collection of Central Pacific and Polynesian Antiquities on display during the 1928 season, and the South Gallery had been cleared with that purpose in mind; but this proved simply impossible, due to Dr. Blaine’s neglect of his duties during the final phase of his illness. The task of completing the preliminary cataloguing devolved upon me.

I suppose I should explain to you officers that the Copeland bequest was the largest and most important acquisition the Sanbourne Institute had ever received since it was first established to house the great Carlton Sanbourne collection itself. Professor Copeland, who died in 1926, was the most distinguished archaeologist in the field of Pacific prehistory, and the fruits of his long and remarkable career lay in the unique collection of artifacts he had built up over half a century of field research. It was composed of several steamer trunks filled with unsorted papers, correspondence, articles clipped from learned quarterlies, unorganized notes and private journals, and several partially complete manuscripts, including one of book length. The artifacts themselves occupied numerous packing crates, and ranged from examples of Tonga Island tapa-cloth weaving to idols and stone images, some of considerable size and weight. The work involved in sorting, identifying, labeling, and classifying this enormous miscellany occupied me for several months.

The most baffling item in the entire collection, however, remained unclassifiable and stubbornly resisted all attempts to identify either the nature of its composition of the style or period of its workmanship. This singular artifact had reputedly been brought up from the depths of the sea off Ponape in 1909 by a native diver. It had attained considerable notoriety in the popular press as “the Ponape figurine”, because in some manner it was intimately connected with Dr. Blaine’s collapse. News stories told how he had raved that it must be destroyed when he had been taken into custody on the night of August third; muck-raking journalists had dug up the slanderous account of Professor Copeland, its discoverer, and repeated yet again the sensationalist accounts of how he had died a babbling maniac in a San Francisco mental institution. These specialists in "yellow journalism" even had the temerity to drag poor Dr. Blaine’s unfortunate condition into their Sunday supplement horror stories. I recall the headline of one, “PONAPE FIGURINE CLAIMS SECOND VICTIM ”, which outraged and disgusted me.

Thereafter, there was no keeping the story quiet. Reporters concocted a ridiculous account of the figurine’s mysterious origins, adding in elements borrowed from the “King Tut's Curse” news stories that had filled the columns of the less reputable press after the opening of the tomb of the Pharaoh Tut-ankh-ammon only five years before. You will perhaps recall the field day the press enjoyed after Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter opened the burial chamber in 1923, which was followed by a series of mysterious deaths of several members of the expedition, including Lord Carnarvon himself, who died two weeks later. The reverberations of this sensational story had all but died down when Dr. Blaine's breakdown became newsworthy; and the muck-rakers delighted in drawing sinister parallels between the curse on a pharaoh’s comb, which some believed had brought many men to a premature death, and the curse on a mysterious Ponape antiquity, which, it was now being rumored, had brought two distinguished scholars to madness.

The lamentable items continued to appear in the public press, much to the distress of everyone connected with the Institute.

FROM time to time we received word from the authorities at the sanitarium of Dr. Blaine’s progress. By mid-January of 1929 he began responding favorably to Dr. Colby’s regimen of treatment, and by the first of March we were delighted to learn that he was able to speak coherently and to recognize people around him, although these lucid intervals were but of brief duration.

On March 3rd I received a telephone call from Dr. Colby, apprising me that my friend was temporarily himself again, although it could not be predicted just how long the interlude of sanity would last. Dr. Blaine was calling me urgently, in a very agitated manner, and the sanitarium staff were of the opinion that it might be salubrious were I to visit him, so that his agitation could be eased and his mind unburdened of whatever matter he desperately desired to reveal to me. I replied that I would come at once.

I motored through the hills, following a winding road, the next morning. Arriving at the sanitarium about ten o’clock, I was taken to Harrington Colby at once. He was a tall, fit-looking man in his late forties with a manner both affable and authoritative. He cautioned me against saying anything that might upset Dr. Blaine, advising me merely to agree to do whatever it was he wished of me. Then he led me into a sunny, pleasant ward that looked out on rolling hills, and left me alone with Dr. Blame.

It was all I could do to greet Dr. Blaine in a casual manner. He seemed to have aged ten years in the six months since his collapse. Hair that had been flecked with iron gray was now streaked with silver-white; he had lost forty or fifty pounds, his face was gaunt and lined, his once-robust figure curiously and horribly shrunken as he crouched in the chair, his trembling hands like pallid, withered claws.

His eyes were haunted and his voice tremulous as he greeted me.

"Hodgkins? Is that you? ... you look so different. I ... listen to me, Hodgkins ... I must know ... is the Ponape figurine yet on public display? ... please God, say it is not!"

I greeted him quietly, said I hoped he was feeling better, and assured him the artifact had not yet been put on display in the South Gallery.

"Thank God for that!” he cried in a weak, quavering voice; then, clutching my arm in a grip numbingly strong, he fixed his eyes on mine. The shadow of some indescribable horror filled chose fine eyes with cold fear.

"The figurine must never be shown, Hodgkins ... never, do you understand? ... it must be destroyed, if the sanity of mankind is to survive ... but you must be extremely careful how you manage it ... there is a terrible force locked in the substance of the figurine ... a force which we do not dare release ... listen to me, boy! The Necronomicon has the secret ... you must locate a copy of the Necronomicon ... try the Miskatonic University Library in Arkham, Massachusetts ... they have a copy of the Spanish edition ... Hodgkins, in the bottom drawer of my desk you will find my file of notes on the Xothic legend cycle ... the drawer is locked, bur you will find the key to it in the little teakwood box from New Guinea on the shelf beside the window where I keep the lava tomb figures from Easter Island ... read the file carefully, before doing anything else! Promise me that you will follow my instructions to the letter, my boy ... until you have absorbed the data in my file, little of this will make any sense to you ... so promise!”

Needless to say I understood absolutely none of this, but he was so pitifully insistent that I swore to do my best to obey his instructions. It was the least I could do, and my words seemed to reassure him. He grew calmer, and much of the tension left his features. We chatted a little on general matters concerning the Institute; shortly thereafter Dr. Colby entered the ward and intimated to me that his patient had had enough excitement for today. I left the sanitarium a few minutes later, after extracting from the physician his promise to keep me informed on the progress of the treatments.

II.

THE afternoon was spent at the Institute, finishing up a few last matters concerning the coming exhibition of the Copeland Collection. I did not again think of Dr. Blaine's urgent insistence that I study the material in his private file until just before I left for the day; recalling his words, and my own promise, I found the key where he had hidden it, unlocked the drawer, and took out the file.

That evening after dinner, I stretched our in an easy chair in my lodgings and began going through the bulging folder. It was filled with heterogeneous material, typewritten and handwritten notes, lists and summaries, packets of newspaper clippings, lengthy abstracts from scholarly works largely unfamiliar to me. and various items of personal correspondence, all bundled together without the slightest semblance of method or order. I could see it would take me quite a while to make head or tail out of all this.

Leafing through the papers, however, I got a general impression from the miscellany. It would seem that Professor Copeland had begun the file, for his spidery hand was unmistakable. He had started collecting newspaper clippings, and had been ordering his note's. The Copeland material formed the basic nucleus of the file. Dr. Blaine had obviously performed extensive work in organizing, collating, and extending the original Copeland material, for his bold yet neat Spencerian hand, quite familiar to me, could be seen throughout the mass of notes, clippings, and manuscript in the form of copious annotations, summaries, and marginal glosses. I glanced quickly through the material that evening, and studied it more closely and in detail for the next several days, so I can give you an accurate overall outline of its central thesis.

It seems that Professor Copeland had gone to the island of Ponape in the Carolines early in 1909, chasing down elusive clues as to a legendary, prehistoric Pacific civilization of vast antiquity. He had first encountered rumors of this lost civilization years earlier, while researching his monumental study Polynesian Mythology, with a Note on the Cthulhu Legend Cycle (1906). While compiling data for that great work of scholarship he had become intrigued by frequent references in the native folklore and literature to a “lost homeland” long since vanished beneath the waves. The old Maori Chant of Eternity, the magnificent but enigmatic Samoan Creation Song, and similar works abound in cryptic allusions to a mysterious lost land called variously "Ha-wa-iki" or "Maui", which last name was puzzlingly reminiscent of the legendary "Mu."

Ponape was the most likely site for Copeland’s opening research on the lost civilization; a mountainous, heavily jungled island, largest of the islands in the Carolines group, it has long been famous for its mysterious and unexplained ruined cities of curious blue stone. These twin megalithic cities, called Nan-Matal and Metalanim, first aroused the bewildered curiosity of European explorers in 1826. when they were discovered by a shipwrecked Irish sailor named O’Connell or O'Connor. It is now a hundred years since the first European glimpsed the cyclopean, basaltic ruined cities of blue stone, and we have as yet no reliable clue to the mystery of their origin.

On Ponape, Copeland heard whispers of certain curious rites that had lingered from time immemorial among the jungle natives; they worshiped a “Water-Being” they called "Lord of the Abyss", and it was rumored the secret rituals included human sacrifice. Copeland was intrigued by how closely these bloody rites paralleled the ancient Semitic worship of the Philistine fish-god Dagon, and he was even more intrigued when, questioning a native "ghost-doctor" about the secret cult, he discovered that the Ponape natives knew all about Dagon, whom they termed "leader of the Deep Ones." It was not Dagon they worshiped, the ghost-doctor confided to him, but one far greater and more terrible even than Dagon, indeed, the very son of Him whom Dagon and the Deep Ones served.

Copeland learned that the sea-god cult had existed in the jungled depths of Ponape for uncounted ages, but had only within recent months grown enormously. The factor had been the discovery of a jade idol, brought up by a native diver from the offshore waters early in that same year. The wizards of the sea-god cult recognized the idol as the very likeness of their god, whom they called Sothmogg. Now Copeland knew he was on the trail of something very interesting, for he had found traces of the sinister, secretive worship of a marine devil-god of similar name all over the Pacific. The Cook Islanders worshiped him as Zatamaga, the “fisherman’s god”; on New Caledonia they venerated him under the name of Hommogah; in the Marquesas, the natives knew him as Z’otomogo, or Zatamagwa; in New Zealand, the Maori shamans knew him as Sothamogha; natives in the Sepik River region of New Guinea called him Zhmog-yaa; and even in South Indo-China, degenerate native cults worshiped a being called Z'mog.

It was Copeland’s theory that this enigmatic sea god of Ponape was none other than Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deeps, one of the three sons of Cthulhu who had been mighty gods in elder Mu before the cataclysm destroyed that shadow-haunted and primal continent in prehistoric times ... Zoth-Ommog, whose name lingers yet in the sealed, forbidden pages of Certain inconceivably ancient books which are preserved under lock and key and armed guard in a handful of the world's great libraries.

Somehow or other, Copeland got possession of the jade statuette, to which his notes refer as "the Ponape Figurine." As he began to delve yet deeper into the enormous literature of this obscure mythology, he learned of strange and terrible things. At Cambridge, he dipped into the horrendous pages of the loathsome Necronomicon itself, the weird and half-mythic “bible" of this ancient mythology. He made another discovery as well: that a mysterious manuscript or document had come to light on Ponape back in 1734, nearly a century before the ancient stone cities had been first discovered. This book, a handwritten codex of frightful antiquity, had been found by a Yankee sea trader, a Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag, who brought it back to his home port, Arkham, Massachusetts, where it was translated for him by a half-breed Polynesian-Asiatic servant. The codex, which was known as the “Ponape Scripture", is now in the Kester Library in Salem.

Copeland studied this Ponape Scripture in Salem, and delved into other hideously suggestive and rightfully suppressed books at Cambridge and at Miskatonic. In time he produced the book he had been researching on Ponape. It was entitled The Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the Ponape Scripture (1911), and it was a death-blow to his scientific reputation. But by then he was deeply immersed in his studies of the age-old, worldwide mythos he had so oddly stumbled upon, and the Xothic file contained his working notes on that subject.

The basic premise of this mythology was that early men had worshiped a pantheon or family of divinities that had come down from the stars when the earth was young. These beings were essentially malign and had ruled man through fear, being more demons than gods; the most common term for them was “the Old Ones", and they were nor even remotely anthropomorphic. They had some innate correspondence to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water: For example, the chief divinity, a winged, octopusheaded monstrosity named Cthulhu, was a sea elemental; his half-brother, Hastur, was an air elemental; another, Cthugha, was a fire elemental; and so on. These were known as "the Great Old Ones”, and subservient to them was a second group of minor entities which Copeland called “the Lesser Old Ones“; this Second group was composed of the beings who Served the Great Old Ones as leaders of their minions or servants. For example, the minions of Cthulhu were called the “Deep Ones", led by “Father Dagon and Mother Hydra", and the minions of Cthugha were the so-called "Flame-Creatures", whose leader, Fthaggua, dwelt on a world called Ktynga; the great air elemental, Hastur, was served by the "Outer Ones", under their leader. N'gha-Kthun. These beings were identified with the famous "Abominable Mi-Go" of Himalayan folklore and Nepalese hill legend, in a note in Dr. Blaine’s hand.

Reading further, I learned that these gods or demons rather resembled the fallen angels of Old Testament lore, having warred against and been defeated by a superior, rival pantheon called "the Elder Gods", who either banished them to distant stars (as Cthugha to Fomalhaut and Hastur to Aldebaran), or imprisoned them at various places upon the earth. Cthulhu himself they locked away in a sunken stone city called R’lyeh beneath the Pacific; his son Ghatanothoa they sealed within a mountain on Mu. His second son, Ythogtha, was imprisoned in a chasm in Yhe, a Muvian province, while Zoth-Ommog lay enchained beneath the ocean off the "Island of the Sacred Stone Cities", which Copeland had identified to his own satisfaction as being Ponape itself. An interlineation at this point stated that Cthulhu had fathered these three godlings on a female entity named Idh-yaa, who dwelt on or near the "dim green double star, Xoth" in the aeons before his descent to this planet. Hence, I assume, the term “Xothic legend cycle" when collating material bearing upon Cthulhu and his "spawn."

As for the twin leaders of this rebellion, Azathoth the "Demon-Sultan" and Ubbo-Sathla the “Unbegotten Source", they were reduced to idiocy by the Elder Gods, who thrust Azathoth beyond the physical universe into primal chaos from which he can never return, while Ubbo-Sathla they confined forever at a subterranean place referred to only as "gray-litten Y’qaa.”

Several factors concerning this account intrigued me at once. In the first place, this mythology bore not the slightest resemblance to any of the native Pacific religions; indeed, the more I came to think about it, these banished or imprisoned gods of evil far more closely correspond to common Indo-European mythologies than to the Pacific island religions, which was quite odd and curious. Reading of banished Hastur and imprisoned Cthulhu and his spawn reminded me at once of the fallen archangel, Lucifer, in the Old Testament, of the titan Prometheus in the Greek myths, and of Norse legends of the imprisoned Loki and his chained children, the wolf Fenris and the gigantic serpent, Iormungandar.

Indeed, from the simple outline of the myths in this Xothic legend cycle, I would most naturally have considered the entire myth structure an example of notions borrowed from earlier legends; but Copeland’s notes were quite firm on the point that the Cthulhu mythology predated the Indo-European civilizations by vast geological epochs of time, which seemed to me completely incredible.

Then, too, there was the extraterrestrial origin of the Great Old Ones, which was an astonishingly sophisticated notion for primitive island cults to have conceived. The notion of the gods of the Cthulhu pantheon as cosmic demons from distant stars and planets seemed like something drawn from the scientific romances of E. E. Smith or Ray Cummings, such as filled the pages of Mr. Gernsback's new magazine, Amazing Stories, a pulp periodical which I had been occasionally picking up at my local newsstand for the last year or two to beguile my leisure with some casual entertainment.

The Copeland notes, as organized by Dr. Blaine, centered largely about Cthulhu in particular and his Xothic spawn, rather to the neglect of the other members of the pantheon. Copeland drew surprisingly convincing parallels between this tentacled monstrosity, chained in his stone city at the bottom of the sea, and the horribly amorphous god of the ocean depths, the horrible Kon, Lord of the Earthquake, venerated by the pre-Incan tribes of Peru; and also to the repulsive "Devourer", the war god of the Quicha religion, and to the Incan divinity Huitzilopochtli. It was his opinion, reiterated over and over, that Cthulhu was the monster behind these “later” mythical beings—the prototype from which they gradually evolved, after the collapse of the empire of primal Mu, destroyed in some prehistoric cataclysm. This contention, by the way, he supported with a wealth of scholarly data which was, superficially at least, most impressive.

Another element which greatly intrigued me was that despite the obscurity of this cult it had apparently been the object of study by scholars in different parts of the world for a long time. Both Copeland’s original notes and Blaine’s additions thereto mentioned any number of scholarly authorities—the Flemish wizard, Ludvig Prinn, a German scientist named von Junzt, an American professor named Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, a titled European demonologist, the Comte d'Erlette, and others. Scholarly investigation of this Cthulhu mythos had seemingly been going on all over the world for some centuries, but in a secretive and surreptitious manner. And I could not help wondering why the subject was surrounded with such secrecy. The oddest item of all was the book to which Dr. Blaine had attached such prime importance during our brief interview at the Sanitarium—the Necronomicon itself. The title, of course, is Greek, but the book itself, apparently the "Bible" of the Cthulhu Cult, had been written by an Arab writer no less than eleven centuries ago!

There seemed to be no genuine grounds for questioning the extreme antiquity of this mysterious mythos, for I found copious documentation for the dates of some of these scholars in standard reference works. But the lack of open, international discussion of this mythos was completely baffling; for centuries, it seemed, there had existed an enormous conspiracy of silence about Cthulhu, his sons and brethren, and their minions and worshipers. I have to admit I found this mysterious secrecy enigmatic, disturbing, and frightfully suggestive ....

OUT of this mass of material, one portion in particular caught my attention. It was a sheaf of manuscript clipped together under the heading "Ponape Figurine."

The first page, in Copeland’s hand, consisted of data concerning the figurine: weight, specific gravity, measurements, and so on. This was followed by Copeland's notes on the hieroglyphic inscription cut into the base of the image—an inscription he tentatively identified as either "Tsath-yo" or "R'lyehian." I had never heard of either of these languages, if that is what they were supposed to be, bur obviously the term “R'lyehian” was derived from "R’lyeh", which was the name of the submerged stone city in which Cthulhu supposedly lay imprisoned. Copeland tentatively identified the figurine as an image of Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deeps, one of the three sons of Cthulhu: Copeland’s notation was that the entity was chained beneath the sea in a submarine chasm off the island of Ponape.

There was something disturbingly suggestive in these facts, when mentioned in juxtaposition. The demon-god from the stars, sealed in a chasm beneath the waters off Ponape ... and an image of that same divinity, brought up by a native diver from those identical waters ....

The implications of the coincidence were strangely frightening, so much so that I felt a sudden curious reluctance to read any further in the file that night. The remainder of the papers did not look very inviting, anyway. They consisted of long, meaningless excerpts from books with wild, nightmarish titles like Cultes des Goules, De Vermis Mysteriis, and so on. Some inner urge, like an unheard voice, seemed almost to be warning me to read no further. It was an odd, and a rather unsettling, sensation.

I suddenly realized that I was very sleepy. I could hardly keep my eyes open and my body yearned for the warm, soft oblivion of sleep. I put the sheaf of notes clipped together under the heading of “Ponape Figurine" back in the folder with the rest of the material and, promising to continue my further investigations tomorrow, decided to turn in and call it a day.

My dreams that night were not ... pleasant.

I am not the sort of person who usually pays any attention to dreams, and rarely, upon awakening, can I recall the shape or sequence of my nocturnal visions, but that night one image filled my dreams, making them hideous, and remained horribly fresh in my mind the next morning.

It was ... a face. Again and again, through the tumbling mists of my dream that face leered out at me with cold and evil eyes, intent and watchful.

The face was not remotely human. It bore the stamp of cruel mockery, of vicious gloating, of inhuman and fiendish glee.

It was a face I knew, a face I had seen before. But in my dreams I knew it not; indeed, it was nor until the following day, when I awoke with morning feeling drained and enervated from a night of feverish and chaotic slumber, that I could recall where I had seen that cruel visage of malignant horror before. And when I did in fact remember, a thrill of inexplicable dread went through me.

It was the face of the Ponape figurine.

III.

THAT morning I brought the Blaine/Copeland file back to my office at the Institute so that I could complete my cursory examination of it, once my morning’s work was out of the way.

The first thing I did was to take out the figurine itself. We kept it in the office safe, together with another item from the Copeland bequest we did not intend to put on public display, as its authenticity had not yet been established. This second item was the dubious and controversial Zanthu Tablets, which Professor Copeland had reputedly discovered in the stone comb of a prehistoric shaman in the mountainous territory north of the Tsang plateau region of central Asia during his ill-faced expedition of 1913. It will perhaps be recalled that it was the ill-advised publication of his shocking and chaotic “conjectural translation” of the Tablets in the form of a privately printed brochure in 1916 that had aroused such a public outcry, from press and pulpit alike, as to impair irreparably his scientific reputation. This set of twelve black jade tablets, narrowly incised on both sides with row upon row of minute characters in an unknown language which Copeland's notes refer to as “hieratic Naacal”, we deemed too notoriously dubious to include in our forthcoming display.

The figurine itself is a most unusual artifact, quite unlike any other sculpture of native workmanship ever found in the Pacific area. It stands nearly nineteen inches high and is exquisitely carved of glossy, highly polished jade of an unfamiliar type not yet identified. The stone itself is a greasy, grayish-white, mottled with irregular patches of dark green, and it is harder and more dense than any other known variety of jade.

The artistry of the carving is surprisingly sophisticated for a region whose sculptural attainments seldom rise above crude, geometrical bas-reliefs and rough, anthropomorphic idol-making. As Dr. Blaine’s notes on the figurine remark, it is “not only non-humanoid, but virtually non-objective—hauntingly suggestive of some of the weird carven figures of the little-known amateur sculptor, Clark Ashton Smith—and in detail and finish, to say nothing of conception, ... weirdly reminiscent of the brilliant if degenerate work produced by the famed San Francisco sculptor, Cyprian Sincaul.” Dr. Blaine’s notes on the figurine are succinct and well phrased to the point where I can hardly hope to improve upon them, so I shall simply quote them directly:

“It represents a peculiar creature with a body shaped like a broadbased, truncated cone. A flat, blunt, wedge-shaped, vaguely reptilian head surmounts this conical torso, and the head is almost entirely hidden behind swirling tresses. This hair, or beard and mane, consists of thickly carved and coiling ropes, like serpents or worms, and the workmanship is so uncannily naturalistic that you could almost swear the slithering tendrils are in motion. Through this repulsive Medusa-mane of ropy tendrils, two fierce, serpent-like eyes glare in a horrible mingling of cold, inhuman mockery and what I can only describe as gloating menace. ... The base upon which this truncated, conical body rests is carved from the same unfamiliar speckled jade, and it is oddly angled, as if the sculptor’s culture possessed a completely non-Euclidean geometry. Deeply and cleanly cut in one side of this odd-angled base are two exceedingly complex hieroglyphs in no language known to me, symbols which bear no similarity to either Chinese ideographs, Egyptian glyphs, Arabic characters. Sanskrit, or even common forms of Mesopotamian cuneiform, and certainly no slightest resemblance to any Southern or Central Pacific native writing known to me.”

Dr. Blaine’s notes on the Ponape figurine conclude thusly: “Rising from overlapping folds at the base of the image’s neck, four bluntly tapering limbs or appendages rise. ... They are flat and resemble the arms of the common echinoderm of the class asteroidea—the familiar starfish of our California beaches—with the rather peculiar exception that the underside of these broad, flat, narrowing limbs bear row upon row of disc-like suckers ... the unknown artist has combined suggestions of starfish and squid or octopi in his central conception.”

Dr. Blaine's description is admirably scientific, but what he cannot suggest is the curiously horrible sensation of distinct unease the observer feels when he looks upon the mysterious figurine. The sensation is quite literally horrible: Something in the cold, fixed, knowing glare of those reptilian eyes of carved, lustrous stone, and some uncanny hint of physical menace in the way the jade tentacles seem to lift and reach, as if striving to seize and entangle the helpless observer in their loathsome coils, is ... quite thoroughly unnerving, and has to be experienced to be believed.

Handling the stone thing was suddenly repugnant. The cold, slick, greasy surface was repellent to the touch, and the sluggish, leaden weight of it suddenly seemed overpoweringly unpleasant. I put the ugly thing down atop the safe and turned with an irrepressible shudder of uneasiness to a scrutiny of the notes.

i had abandoned my study of the file on the figurine the night before at the point at which Professor Copeland had inserted several lengthy and incomprehensible excerpts quoted from scholarly or mythological texts. I read these with intense curiosity, mingled, I must admit, with slight amusement and contempt, for the farrago of superstitious mumbo-jumbo sounded like the spewings of a mad brain. Nevertheless, remembering Blaine’s urgent warnings about the danger that lurked in the Ponape figurine, I must say I found a singularly ominous undertone pervading the excerpts.

The first item was a quotation copied from Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis. It ran as follows:

“Byatis, the serpent-bearded, the god of forgetfulness, came with the Great Old Ones from the stars, called by obeisances made to his image” this passage was heavily underscored, probably by Professor Copeland. It continued: "which was brought by the Deep Ones to Earth. He may be called by the touching of his image by a living being." That passage was underscored, as well. "His gaze brings darkness of the mind; and it is told that those who look upon his eye will be forced to walk into his clutches. He feasts upon those who stray to him, and from those upon whom he feasts he draws a part of their vitality, and so grows vaster. For there is this about those images of the Great Old Ones brought down from the stars when all the Earth was young, that a psychic link connects such as Byatis or Han to their images, and they that worship the Great Old Ones and who serve them on this plane may communicate with their Masters through such eidola: but a fate darkling and terrible beyond belief is reserved for they who unwittingly possess such idols from Beyond, for them the Old Ones drain of vitality through this psychic link, and their dreams are made hideous with nightmare glimpses of the Ultimate Pit."

The passage from Prinn’s book broke off there. I mused over it, and suddenly I recalled the long weeks Dr. Blaine hail studied the Ponape figurine, which Professor Copeland had believed an image of Zoth-Ommog, and how he had complained of bad dreams during those weeks of proximity to the figurine.

The next quotation was from a book called Revelations of Glaaki, or from a part of it, which Professor Copeland referred to as "the suppressed twelfth volume", whatever he meant by that cryptic remark. This second quotation, also, was a frenzied babbling of weird names and meaningless symbols, and it had much of the sinister nightmarish tone of certain volumes of the Biblical apocrypha. It went as follows, beginning apparently in the very middle of a sentence:

... so may Y’golonac return to walk among men and await that time when the earth is cleared off and Cthulhu rises from his tomb among the weeds, Glaaki thrusts open the crystal trapdoor, the brood of Eihort are born into daylight, Shub-Niggurath strides forth to smash the moon-lens. Byatis bursts forth from his prison. Daoloth tears away illusion to expose the reality concealed behind, Aphoom Zhah rises from the bowels of Yarak at the ultimate and boreal pole, Ghatanothoa emerges from his crypt beneath the mountain-top fortress of Yaddith-Gho in eldritch Mu, and Zoth-Ommog ascends from the ocean deeps, Iä! Nyarlathotep! By their very images shall ye conjure them.

The third of these excerpts was the most inexplicable of all; it had been taken from a book by the Comte d’Erlette, the Cultes des Goules and it went thusly:

There is a Terror lurks in carven stone: not without reason do the children of the wastes shun horrible and thousand-columned Irem, whereof each pillar bears up an eidolon of Those Who Dwell Afar, and it is not idle superstition that bids the beholder shudder when he looks upon the monstrous and brooding Sphinx, remembering that tenebrous and frightful thing whereof it is but a simulacrum. But more to be shunned and dreaded even than these are those images brought down from Beyond ere the first Men slunk whimpering through the steaming fens of the primal Earth; for those eidola are imbued with a loathsome curse, and betimes they drain the strength of men, or fill their minds with loathsome and seductive dreams; and some whisper that the Outside Ones can be summoned hither through their very images; but I pray this last be but idle legend, for if it be truth, then the World stands in horrendous peril until such star-brought idols be destroyed to the last one.

To this final quotation there was affixed, as a marginal gloss in Professor Copeland’s spidery script, a note which Dr. Blaine had underscored three times: "Cf. NEC. III. xvii."

This, I suddenly realized, was the single item of transcendent import to which poor, deranged Dr. Blaine had pitiably strove to direct my attention. This clue told me exactly where in the pages of that mysterious Necronomicon could be found the ritual or formula whereby the Ponape figurine could safely be destroyed!

So significant did this fact appear that I took out my pocket notebook on the spot and copied down that marginal gloss in full, so that I could not mislay the information.

And, even as I did so, an indescribable feeling of being watched came over me. The skin literally crept at the nape of my neck, and an inexplicable paralysis of overwhelming fear seized me. The pressure of cold, unseen, malignant eyes from somewhere behind me was simply unmistakable.

Someone ... or something ... was watching me, with a chilling, completely evil, calculating glare.

I turned around suddenly, and looked into cold, carved eyes of lifeless stone. It was the jade image of Zoth-Ommog, which I had left on top of the office safe.

I forced a shaky laugh, and tried to shrug off the distinct feeling of uneasiness. But I could have sworn that when I put the image down earlier, it had been facing the other way.

FOR the next week or so I was too deeply immersed in my official duties to return to a further study of the Xothic legend cycle. The directors of the Institute had met in formal session several times during this interval, and the trend of these meetings was singularly disturbing to me.

To put it bluntly, it was in the process of being decided that the display of the Copeland collection should after all include the Ponape figurine! It was the feeling of the directors that public interest in the notorious figurine, whipped up by regrettably sensational newspaper articles, would bring the public to the Institute in droves, curious to see for themselves the mysterious idol whose ancient "curse“ had driven two famous scholars insane.

Although I cannot quite explain why, I must admit I was appalled at this decision and did my best to argue the directors out of it. In this attempt I failed resoundingly, for I could offer no factual evidence as to the unwisdom of this act. What, after all, could I say—that one man, who had died a raving maniac, had scribbled down some notes on an obscure mythology—notes which seemed to suggest that a weird and supernatural danger hovered about the bit of sculpture? Or could I argue that another man, still confined to a sanitarium because of a nervous breakdown, had uttered some vague, hysterical warnings against displaying the statuette? Obviously, I could hardly use these arguments, based on superstition and hysteria, to counter the decision of the directors. In fact, I could find no basis to justify my own feeling of uneasiness at the thought of exposing the figurine before a curious and sensation-hungry public; surely, even I did not accept this occult nonsense to be literally true!

Or—did I?

Despite my own lack of conviction, I argued as eloquently as I could against the decision. I tried to convey the notion that to put the Ponape figurine on public display would be premature—that its authenticity had yet to be fully established—that to display a questionable piece would be mere sensation-mongering, mere headline-hunting. To these arguments, the directors listened courteously, but nothing I could say swayed their opinion in the slightest degree.

In the meantime, I redoubled my efforts to locate a copy of the Necronomicon. I fired off telegrams by the dozen, and the replies that came trickling back were unanimously disappointing. None of the universities in the state seemed to possess a copy of this fabulously rare volume, and none of the great private libraries or collections would admit to owning it, either. My desperation to find the Necronomicon must have seeped through the formal phraseology of my missives, for some of the libraries replied in sympathetic, helpful tones to my queries. Of these, the Huntington was most friendly, advising me to try the British Museum, the Kester Library in Salem, or the Miskatonic library in Arkham. The note from the Huntington helpfully added that they did, at least, have a copy of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, which reputedly discussed a range of material parallel to much of the substance of the Necronomicon. I was grateful for their helpfulness at the Huntington, but the last thing I needed was the von Junzt; a copy of the 1840 Düsseldorf edition of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten had been found among Professor Copeland’s papers, and was currently in the library of the Institute, although I had not yet had the opportunity to look into it.

The Huntington's suggestion that I try the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, recalled to mind Dr. Blaine’s identical stricture. I sent off a wire to the university library, inquiring if they possessed the Necronomicon, and seeking to arrange an interlibrary loan. A day or two later I received a friendly reply from the librarian at Miskatonic, a Dr. Henry Armitage, which said that their collection did indeed include a copy of the Necronomicon in the Latin version of Olaus Wormius. printed in Spain during the seventeenth Century, but that it was simply too rare anti valuable to be permitted to leave the collection. Dr. Armitage added that Miskatonic possessed the only copy of the complete edition known to exist in America, and that there had been numerous attempts in recent years to purchase it from the library, and even to steal the precious volume. His reply was affable and friendly, adding that if it was at all possible for me to visit Arkham, he would be delighted to permit me to examine the Necronomicon at my leisure.

By this time it had become clear to me that if I was going to study the Necronomicon's recipe for the destruction of the figurine, I was indeed going to have to make the long trip from Santiago to Arkham, Mass. And, in fact, I could see a way to do it. For the Institute still owed me two weeks' vacation, as I had volunteered to give up my vacation and stay on duty the previous year, when Dr. Blaine had suffered his nervous collapse.

Now that my work on organizing and classifying the Copeland bequest was finished, the Institute actually had no pressing need of my services, and could well afford to give me the next two weeks off for a brief vacation from my duties. I wasted no time in making such a request of the directors, and received their favorable reply. I then dispatched a wire to Dr. Armitage, informing him of my trip, and began looking up railroad schedules.

IV.

THE trip was long and slow and time-consuming. I took a bus to Los Angeles and caught the cast-bound train there, changing trains in Denver and again in Chicago, and one last time in Boston, where I boarded a local for the last leg of my journey.

I had taken a private compartment all the way, and, thinking I would need something to read during the long trip, I had brought along in my briefcase Professor Copeland’s copy of the rare Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt. In abstracting this book from the Institute’s files, I suppose I was guilty of a technical irregularity, but it was hardly likely to be missed, as no one on the staff knew or cared to know what it was.

I examined the book with some curiosity. It was a big quarto, bound in dark leather with rust-eaten iron hasps. I had looked the book’s history up and had learned this was the original binding, and that only a half dozen known copies of this first edition are extant. Von Junzt, or, to give his full name, Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, had been born at Cologne in 1795, taught as a professor of Occultism and Metaphysics at the famous University of Wurttemberg, and died under singularly curious circumstances in Düsseldorf in 1839, just before his monumental book appeared in print for the first time. There was a cheap and faulty “pirated" edition published by Bridewell in 1815, and a heavily expurgated version in English appeared in 1909 from Golden Goblin Press in New York City.

I opened it at random; it was in German, of course, and the paper was in quite good condition considering that the volume was nearly a century old, although the pages were somewhat smudged and stained. As I flipped through the front matter my eye was caught by the name "Abdul Alhazred" on page ix. Alhazred, of course, was the Muslim demonologist whose chief claim to fame was his authoring of the Necronomicon; I read the passage which contained this reference to him, which began "es sieht zweifel, dass dieses Buch ist die Grundlage der Okkultelileratur", and was amused to see what von Junzt had to say about Alhazred’s reputed insanity, which was more than a trifle ironic in light of the fact that many of his learned colleagues of the time had thought von Junzt quite seriously deranged himself.

Before long I found myself thoroughly engrossed in the turgid prose of the great German occultist. His book discussed many weird and curious cults which survived in the remoter corners of the world, such as the Thuggee murder-cults of India and the Dacoits of Burma and the corpse-eating cult of further Thibet, but centrally the book concerned itself with a worldwide network of secret societies who served or worshiped the Great Old Ones. The opening part of this central section of the book was an essay of considerable length which traced the descent of the Old Ones from their mighty parents or progenitors (von Junzt remained ambiguous as to their sex) who were named Azathoth and Ubbo-Sathla, names I recollected had been mentioned in the Copeland notes. This essay, which ran to something like ninety pages of text, was called the "Narrative of the Elder World", and was partly a translation of the third book of the Livre d'ivon, a book written or translated by a 13th Century Norman-French scholar called Gaspard du Nord, and partly an annotation or exegesis of the third book, which von Junzt had put together by collating the Livre d'ivon text with comparable data given in the Latin Necronomicon. Although interminable, written in the long-winded style typical of classic Germanic scholarship, this account of the basic mythology contained a considerable amount of material that was new to me, and much that was not to be found in the Blaine/Copeland notes.

From my earlier study of the Copeland file on the Xothic material I already knew that the professor had long strove to obtain a copy of von Junzt’s famous (or perhaps infamous) tome. Now, as I delved deeper. I found that von Junzt’s book was invaluable to scholars of this mythology because, of all those who had studied or written upon this legend cycle, it was von Junzt alone who had had unlimited access to certain unthinkably old and fantastically rare mythological works which contained precious information on the details of the mythos not available to the later writers on this subject.

Among these exceedingly rare books was one known as the Pnakotic Manuscripts which, like the du Nord book, had never been printed and was circulated in manuscript only among the cultists. The Pnakotic Manuscripts was, however, unthinkably more ancient than the Livre d'ivon, or Book of Eibon as it is sometimes known. The traditional account of the origins of the Manuscripts (which von Junzt solemnly repeats without comment) claims that the earliest chapters were reputedly set down before the first forms of life had come into existence on this Earth, the authors supposedly a mysterious extraterrestrial race of mental entities from “Yith” who came to this planet long before the advent of human or even mammalian life, and who dwelt somewhere in primordial Australia in a cyclopean stone city known to subsequent races as "Pnakotus", a name which was believed to mean something in the nature of “The City of the Archives.” From this name, Pnakotus, obviously, the title Pnakotic Manuscripts was presumably derived.

Yet another sourcebook, even more terrifyingly ancient and alien, was believed to have been used by the German occultist—that dread chronicle, the Ghorl Nigräl, whose ultra-telluric origin is the secret of one of the most horrible of the dark myths locked within the dim pages of the Book of Eibon. There it is called The Book of Night, and it is told that the clawed, snouted, nonhuman wizard Zkauba, on a world called Yaddith of the Five Moons, thieved it from the monstrous Dholes. Von Junzt records of this Ghorl Nigräl that only one copy has ever been brought down to this planet from frightful Yaddith in all the immeasurable ages of Earth's existence in this part of space. This single copy is hidden somewhere in the black depths of Asia, at a place called Yian-Ho; there the book is whispered of in a thousand legends as “the hidden legacy of eon-old Leng." According to Gottfried Mülder, a scientist who accompanied von Junzt on his travels, and who contributed a foreword to the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, von Junzt was the only completely human entity who has been permitted to peruse this horribly ancient book whose origins, if truly given, are so alien as to stagger the imagination. To examine the Ghorl Nigräl, von Junzr had to venture to a remote, obscure, ill-reputed stone monastery somewhere in the interior of China, to which a train of yellow masked and robed and “oddly-misshapen” monks bore the precious codex from its secret hiding place for his perusal, in return for a certain price so repugnant and horrible that Mülder shudderingly refused to discuss it and went to his deathbed with the secret locked within him. This same Mülder, long alter the death of von Junzt, whereof such odd and frightful stories were whispered, wrote an attempted reconstruction of what he remembered von Junzt telling him about the contents of this mysterious book, using Mesmerism and something which sounds like self-hypnosis to obtain perfect recall. His book, The Secret Mysteries of Asia, with a Commentary on the Ghorl Nigräl, was published at Mülder’s own expense at Leipzig in 1847; copies are exceptionally rare, for the authorities seized and burned almost the entire printing, and Mülder himself narrowly escaped hanging by fleeing to Metzengerstein, where he died in a madhouse eleven years later.

THE copy of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten which Copeland had purchased from a dealer in rare books in Prague proved exceptionally interesting. The "Black Book" as it is sometimes called (the title translates as "Nameless Cults”), contains a vast wealth of material not even hinted at in the Copeland file. The old-fashioned black-letter text was difficult to read, but the strange marvels therein were so enthralling that I persevered.

According to von Junzt’s account, the planet Earth was not originally a part of this physical universe at all, but originated in another, totally alien plane or dimension of being, that wherein the race of benevolent divinities known as the Elder Gods were supreme. The Elder Gods, near the very beginning of time, decided to create a subrace of lesser entities to be their slaves and thus brought into being the twin monstrosities, Azathoth and Ubbo-Sathla. These two beings, which seemed to be androgynous or multi-sexual, were to spawn a host of minor godlings who would serve the Elder Gods. But Azathoth and Ubbo-Sathla rebelled against their masters, and it was Ubbo-Sathla who stole from the Gods that aeon-old library of hieroglyph-engraved stone tablets, the Elder Records, which he hid away in his gray-lit abode of Y’qaa, deep within the earth. When the Elder Gods rose up in their wrath to seek out the place where the immemorial library lay concealed, Ubbo-Sathla evoked the cosmic powers he had learned from study of the Records, and Earth and its primal denizen fell from their original plane or dimension into our own universe, followed not long thereafter by Azathoth and the first-born of his spawn, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Cxaxukluth, and yet other primordial entities. According to von Junzt, Earth fell into our present universe “untold vingtillions of aeons ago."

This account of the rebellion of the original Great Old Ones was followed by a lengthy and detailed description of the descent and genealogy of the Great Old Ones, revealing much information unavailable to Copeland. According to von Junzt, Azathoth and his spawn traversed the stellar immensitudes from the edge of our universe to the region wherein Earth now resided, and along the way spawned yet other beings of their hellish breed. Yog-Sothoth, for example, first mated with a female denizen of a world called Vhoorl, which lay "deep in the twenty-third nebula", thus fathering Cthulhu; later, he maced with a second divinity at a place not named, fathering Cthulhu’s half-brother, Hastur the Unspeakable.

Hastur, in turn, mated with a divinity named Shub-Niggurath, to spawn three sons named Ithaqua, Lloigor, and Zhar, who were air elementals similar to their terrible sire. Cthulhu himself mated with an entity named Idh-yaa at a place called Xoth, thus fathering Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog. who accompanied their mighty sire down to Earth in later aeons, as I already knew from the Copeland file. As well, the fire elemental Cthugha spawned, on a world circling the star Fomalhaut, another fire elemental like himself named Aphoom Zhah, who descended to Earth, coming down in remote arctic regions. There was much more genealogical information than this given in the prolix pages of von Junzt, but I lack the time to discuss it in further detail. Let it suffice to say that the Great Old Ones grew numerous and when they entered this region of space, they invested Earth and three solar planets, among which was Mars, which became the dominion of Vulchoom, third of the sons of Yog-Sothoth. Cthulhu and his spawn took the Pacific for their empire, while Tsathoggua, the son of Ghizguth, took primal Hyperborea; Aphoom Zhah and his spawn extended their dominion over the regions of the ultimate boreal pole.

Earth at that time was ruled by a race of entities known as the Primordial Ones, described by von Junzt as "winged, crinoid-headed, semivegetable denizens of paleogean Antarctica", against whom Certain of the Great Old Ones, principally Cthulhu and his Xothic spawn, warred. Not long thereafter another race contested with them for the supremacy of Earth, the so-called "Great Race of Yith", a swarm of purely mental entities who voyaged to this planet through time and space, assuming the bodies of a cone-shaped race already resident in primal Australia. The Great Race unleashed frightful weapons of terrific potency against the Old Ones, and even managed to drive them underground into enormous caverns for a time. But here the Old Ones encountered their lost brethren, the spawn of Ubbo-Sathla, and their power was vastly augmented. For during the numberless ages, Ubbo-Sathla had begotten many offspring as he wallowed in his gray-lit abyss of Y’qaa, and among these were Zulchequon and Abhoth, Nyogtha and Yig, Atlach-Nacha and Byatis and dark Han. Before long the Old Ones burst from the depths of the earth to challenge the Great Race, but by that time the Elder Gods had entered this universe and, centering their power about the star Betelgeuse, descended into this solar system to punish their former slaves for their iniquitous rebellion. The Great Race abandoned Earth, fleeing first to Jupiter, and next to a dark star in Taurus; their eventual goal, says von Junzt, is given in the Pnakotic Manuscripts as the future age of a post-human beetle race here on Earth. When life becomes extinct upon this planet, they will migrate to inhabit a race of bulbous vegetable entities on Mercury.

The Great Old Ones transported the Elder Records to a planet of the star Celaeno for safekeeping and fought mightily against the Elder Gods, but were defeated, as Copeland's notes had already informed me. But the Unaussprechlichen Kulten gave a much more detailed account of the banishment or imprisonment of the Great Old Ones than that contained in Copeland’s cursory summary. Nyarlathotep, for example, lies enchained on "the World of Seven Suns", which von Junzt equates with the "shadow-haunted Abbith to which the Pnakotic Manuscripts so cryptically allude"; Hastur they sealed in the “cloudy depths" of Lake Hali, at Carcosa, on a world near Aldebaran in the constellation of the Hyades; while his brother, Vulthoom, together with his minions, the Aihais, and Ta-Vho-Shai their leader, the Elder Gods prisoned in the cavernous abyss of Ravormos, on Mars, beneath the age-old city of Ignar-Varh. Cthugha was sealed away on a planet encircling the star Fomalhaut, as I had already learned, but von Junzt added the datum that his chief minion. Fthaggua, and the Flame-Creatures, or “Fire-Vampires” as the Necronomicon calls them, were banished to a distant world—Ktynga, it is called—and von Junzt tentatively identifies it with Norby’s Comet, a stellar object in the vicinity of Antares which some astronomers believe will approach perilously close to our own planer some four centuries from now. As well, I might add, it was to "nightmarish Yaddith", a world near Deneb, that Shub-Niggurath was banished; while Lloigor and Zhar, two of the sons of Hastur, lie enchained beneath a ruined city in the jungles of Burma, served by their loathly minions, the Tcho-Tcho people, whose leader is E-poh.

As for the spawn of Ubbo-Sathla, several of them—such as Abhoth the Unclean, the spider-god Atlach-Nacha, and Zulchequon—are imprisoned with him, or near him, in primal caverns far beneath the earth, while Nyogtha was driven from this world, and is penned on a lightless world near the star Arcturus. But most of the Lesser Old Ones, it would seem, are not imprisoned. and work ever to free their masters from the bondage of the Elder Sign. Among these are Dagon and Hydra, who dwell on the ocean's floor, either in sunken R'lyeh or at a place called "many-columned Y’ha-nthlei", and Ubb, leader of the repulsive yuggs, who serve Ythogtha and Zoth-Ommog, and who also dwell beneath the sea. Naggoob, the “Father of Ghouls”, chieftain of the servitors of Nyogtha the Dweller in Darkness, is also free, as are Quumyagga, leader of the shantaks; Sss'haa, chief of the serpentmen or Valusians who serve Yig, Father of Serpents; and Rlim Shaikorth, leader of the Cold Ones who are the minions of Aphoom Zhah ....

Hour after hour, as my train roared on across the prairies through the gathering darkness, I read ever deeper in this hellish and blasphemous forbidden lore, gripped by a sick fascination I can neither excuse nor explain. Finally I could read no more and turned shudderingly from the hypnotic pages of the old book to seek my bunk, and my feverish and nightmare-ridden dreams.

V.

ARKHAM, Massachusetts is an ancient Colonial town northeast of Boston on the bleak north Atlantic Coast. Back in the dark days of the grim witchcraft hysteria, it had an evil reputation among the sober, God-fearing Puritan divines, and earned a notoriety second only to Salem as a center of the secret witch-covens. Of course, those days have long since passed by, but terrible legends are still whispered of the decaying old seaport and of its neighboring towns, Dunwich and Innsmouth and Kingsport. Back in the great days of the Yankee clipper ships, it was a rich and populous and bustling center of the sea trade; those days, too, have passed by, and today it is a crumbling backwater, slumping into a decay from which it will most likely never rise.

The Boston-Arkham local followed the curse of the Miskatonic River, and we entered Arkham at dusk on March the twentieth when the sky was a smoky crimson conflagration in the west. The town was drowned in a haze, with only the peaked church spires thrusting up against the darkening sky. The transition from sparsely wooded hills and scattered farms to the bleak, red-brick warehouses and commercial buildings along Water Street was quite abrupt. I got off at the B&M Station at the corner of High Lane and Garrison Street, and found a sleepy-eyed porter to carry my bag through the drafty, echoing, cavernous barn of a terminal to a small taxicab stand on the street. The cab was an old rattle-trap of a much-abused Model T, but the driver was a garrulous old character with side whiskers, so talkative as to belie the legend that all backwoods Yankees from this corner of the country were cantankerous and close-mouthed, suspicious of strangers.

Dr. Armitage had been kind enough to arrange rooms for me at the Athenaeum Club, so I asked the cabman to drive me there. We crossed the river by the Garrison Street Bridge to the southern section of town, my driver pointing out the local sights along the way. The Athenaeum Club was on Church Street, two blocks away from the university itself. The wind was raw and cold, the sky leaden, the streets and sidewalks heaped with snow. I shivered through my topcoat, this being my first experience with a New England winter.

My rooms were spacious and elegant; I unpacked swiftly, aware of feeling famished. There had been no dining car on the Boston-Arkham local and I had eaten nothing since lunch. It was too late in the evening for the club dining parlor to be still open, but the gentleman at the desk directed me to an excellent old restaurant at the foot of French Hill, only a brisk walk away. I retired early and, next morning, rose early, for my appointment with Dr. Armitage was to be at ten o’clock. It was a gray, dull day, the wind raw, the air bitterly cold. Gusts of sleet swept the narrow old streets, and the wind that blew off the river pierced my garments like a knife.

Arkham was an old, old town, and the signs and tokens of its Colonial past lay all about me as I strode down Church Street to the university quadrangle. To every side I saw buildings of amazing antiquity—many of them doubtless mansions built by the great 18th-century Arkham merchants, wealthy from the India trade. Some of the houses I passed undoubtedly dated to the Restoration, or even to Charles I. The street was an antiquarian’s dream: rows of dormer windows, occasionally a fine old gambrel roof, peaked and overhanging gables, diamond-paned windows, doors with old brass knockers and fanlights above the lintels, and many of the roofs bore quaint "widows' walks." I passed Christ Church, one of the local landmarks, with its classic Georgian facade and steeple. Some of the alley ways were still cobbled, and I glimpsed gaslight fixtures through one window as I passed. Over all, however, brooded neglect and moldering decay, the tawdry and faded gloom of a city long past its prime.

Miskatonic University occupies an entire block, facing on the main business thoroughfare, Church Street, between West and Garrison. Most of the buildings are Georgian, but were restored sometime in the late 19th century, and badly, by someone with a hideous taste for Victorian Gothic. I entered by the huge wrought-iron front gate, framed between ugly redbrick columns, where a guard directed me to the faculty lounge where I was to meet Dr. Armitage, which lay across the snow-heaped quadrangle.

The faculty lounge was a long room, oak-paneled, with a superb fireplace of Georgian marble, and old, gilt-framed paintings of former deans and presidents frowning down on Florentine marble-topped tables neatly strewn with scholarly journals and on large, comfortable chairs upholstered in dark leather. Dr. Armitage was a large, ruddy-cheeked man with silver hair and keen blue eyes of piercing intensity which could as easily twinkle with good-humored zest its turn frosty with stern reproof. I had looked him up in the academic directories and knew that he had taken his M.A. degree here at Miskatonic and his doctorate at Princeton, and had as well an honorary Litt. D. from Johns Hopkins. Among the several books or pamphlets to his credit was a celebrated monograph titled Notes Toward a Bibliography of World Occultism, Mysticism, and Magic, which the Miskatonic University Press had issued in 1927.

The doctor greeted me warmly, wringing my hand in a firm and virile grip which belied the years evident in his silver locks. In an expansive and genial manner he hastened to introduce me to several of his colleagues, among them a fine-looking older man of ascetic and aristocratic mien who was Dr. Seneca Lapham of the Anthropology Department, Professor William Dyer the geologist, Dr. Ferdinand Ashley of the Department of Ancient History, and a young literature instructor named Wilmarth, an amateur folklorist of some note, as well as a young psychology instructor a year or two older than myself named Peaslee. The name seemed familiar, and before long I realized that he must be the son of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, former Professor of Political Economy here at Miskatonic, who had suffered a classic attack of amnesia a dozen or so years back, much written up in the newspapers and scientific journals of the day.

I accompanied Armitage and Dr. Lapham to the librarian’s office, after a bracing cup of steaming tea. The university library is a very large red-brick building, situated at the southeast corner of the block, at the corner of Garrison and College Streets. A huge dog is kept chained at the foot of the Italian marble steps leading up to the main entrance—a bull mastiff, I believe. He rose at our approach and regarded us levelly, not exactly in a menacing manner, but warily, as if ascertaining just who we were, with an eye toward inquiring if we had legitimate business here.

"Good boy, Cerberus, that's a good fellow," Armitage greeted him; satisfied, the great dog settled down once again, permitting us to pass. We entered a dim hall whose arched ceiling was adorned with faded frescoes. Marble busts done in the classic manner were placed on pedestals at intervals along the length of the hall, and among them I recognized Thoreau, Longfellow, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman. Whittier, and James Russell Lowell. There was one I did not recognize, a stern-lipped fellow with a stony glare. I inquired as to his identity. Dr. Armitage chuckled, and parted the marble pate as he passed it.

“That staunch old Puritan, Cotton Mather,” he chuckled. "A bit out of place in such literary company, perhaps, but we could hardly do without him—Arkham and Salem were his favorite hunting grounds, in the old witchcraft days’"

We mounted a curving stair with gleaming mahogany banister and superb 18th-century carved posts, and were ushered into the librarian’s office, crowded with filing cabinets and cluttered with books and papers. Armitage cleared off chairs for Dr. Lapham and myself, bade us sit, and seated himself behind a huge cluttered desk. He unlocked the bottom drawer, removing therefrom a large quarto volume, bound in cracked, ancient black leather and sealed with rust-eaten hasps, which he placed on the desk before him. A thrill of tremulous excitement rose within me at the sight of the old book.

I knew at once it was the Necrcinoinicon.

DR. Armitage fixed me with an intent but friendly eye.

"Now, young Hodgkins, the first thing I want to say is that you may speak freely before Dr. Lapham and myself. We have a very good idea of your problem, and why it is so urgent that you consult the Necronomicon, and you need not be shy about discussing such matters in front of us. Neither of us will laugh at you ... God knows, we are both horribly familiar with these matters. This concerns the Great Old Ones, does it not? In particular, Zoth-Ommog, the son of great Cthulhu, whose jadeite image poor mad Copeland fetched back from Ponape—"

"How in the world did you know?” I blurted in astonishment. Armitage grinned, and Dr. Lapham leaned over to touch my arm.

"Mr. Hodgkins, I assure you that both Armitage and I have a deplorable taste for the more sensational newspapers—not that Stephenson Blaine’s story has not found its way even into the staid columns of the Boston Globe—and the Arkham Advertiser, our local paper, as well. I am ‘sitting in' on this conference because Armitage knows I have made a private study of the Cthulhu pantheon for many years, and may well have something of merit to contribute. Your problem is, we deduce from the pages of the Necronomicon your inquiry informed us you wish to study, the problem of safely destroying the Ponape figurine. If is indeed a serious problem, and you should feel free to speak openly on the subject.''

“Yes,” Dr. Armitage nodded. “We have here at the library perhaps the greatest collection of books and documents regarding the Cthulhu mythology that exists in the entire world—probably the finest and most comprehensive collection ever compiled. Beside old Alhazred, we have Prinn and von Junzt, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Norman French version of the Book of Eibon, the Celaeno Fragments, Cultes des Goules, both the R'lyeh Text and the Dhol Chants, the Hsan, the Cabala of Saboth and the Egyptian Black Rites, Porta, Remigius, a manuscript copy of Wintcrs-Hall's translation of The Sussex Manuscript, a few pages of the Invocation to Dagon, and other works as well. Needless to say, more than a few members of the faculty have studied this literature over the years. Indeed, until he disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances back in 1915, one of our fellow faculty members. Dr. Laban Shrewsbury of the Philosophy Department, enjoyed a reputation as perhaps the greatest living authority on the Cthulhu myth cycle. Among the other books, our collection includes his authoritative study, An Investigation into the Myth Patterns of Latter-day Primitives, with Especial Reference to the R’lyeh Text, which the University Press first issued in 1913. A great pity Shrewsbury isn’t here; his advice on your problem would be invaluable!"

Dr. Seneca Lapham expressed his agreement. “However, between Armitage and myself, we can undoubtedly be of some help. Now, I don’t exactly know how much of the literature of the mythology you have studied, young fellow, but I can assure you that if the Ponape figurine is, after all, one of the images brought down from the stars as would seem likely, then the problem of safely disposing of it is a serious one. As the Necronomicon will tell you, those likenesses of the Great Old Ones which were not made on this Earth are very dangerous to meddle with, potentially lethal, in fact. The surviving cults which worship the Old Ones can summon their Masters to manifest themselves physically on this plane by means of certain rituals performed before such images; the peril to human civilization such manifestations entail should be obvious. Luckily, the physical manifestations of the Old Ones on this plane are of temporary duration, with the exception of Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos—”

Armitage interrupted at this point, complaining that we were wasting valuable time in fruitless discussion. “The important question we must decide is how the figurine can best be destroyed," he said impatiently. “Let us concentrate on that. Now, one method that comes to mind is to invoke the aid of an opposing entity—perhaps you know the Comte d'Erlette’s classification system, Mr. Hodgkins, which sorts the various Old Ones into four groups identified with the four elements of the Medieval mystics? Well, according to this system, certain of the entities are fundamentally in opposition to certain of their brethren, and their aid may be invoked against the manifestations of their rivals. Cthugha, for instance, as a fire elemental, has been successfully invoked against such earth elementals as Shub-Niggurath, Nyogtha, Tsathoggua, and even Nyarlathotep. By this process of reasoning, the air elementals, such as Hastur or Ithaqua, may be invoked against sea elementals, like your Zorh-Ommog. A possibility exists in this—”

Dr. Lapham nodded. “I agree; moreover, Hastur is rather ambiguous in his dealings with men, and has never seemed overtly hostile to them. However, why don’t we permit this young man to peruse the Necronomicon at his leisure; the star-stone exorcism Alhazred recommends may after all be the best answer to his problem."

"Very well,” Armitage said. He tapped the large, leather-bound volume on the desk before him. "Knowing your stay here was to be of brief duration, I removed the Necrwomicon from the Rare Book Room the first thing this morning. I have inserted a marker at the passage you were interested in, young man, and a second marker indicates a relevant entry you should examine. Now. please make yourself at home—you’ll find pen and ink and paper right there on the desk, if you wish to take notes—Lapham and I will be back in an hour or so to continue this discussion. Oh, the text is in 17th-century Latin, and is printed in German black-letter ... I hope that will not offer you any difficulties? Excellent, excellent! Well, just make yourself at home, then; come along, Lapham."

The door closed behind them, and I was alone with the famous Necronomicon at last.

VI.

THE heavy old book was bound in thick black leather, much cracked and flaking with age. It was sealed with hinges and a lock of rust-eaten iron, in the manner of books printed in Europe during the 17th century. I opened it gingerly, and was appalled at the noxious miasma of decay that arose to my nostrils from the withered, stained, and yellowed pages; nevertheless, I had come too far to hesitate now. Mastering the involuntary spasm of nausea that welled up in me as I breathed in the almost palpable reek of corruption that arose from the ancient and moldering tome, I pored over the thickly printed pages.

The translator, I knew, had been the Danish scholar Olaus Wormius, born in Jutland and subsequently famed for his Greek and Latin studies. He had from some unknown source obtained a copy of the rare Greek translation of the Necronomicon, which the Byzantine scholar Theodoras Philetas had secretly made from the original Arabic about A.D. 950. The text Wormius had used for his own Latin version was, in all likelihood, that of the original Constantinople edition later banned by the Patriarch Michael. The Wormius translation had itself only been published twice, the first printing having been a black-letter edition published in Germany around the year 1400, the second being the Spanish edition of 1622.

Glancing through the volume I was surprised to discover that, regardless of the large size of the quarto pages (which were about nine and one-half by twelve inches), rather less wordage appeared on each page than you might have expected from its proportions. This was due to the deep margins and gutters used by the printer, and also to the thick and clumsy black-letter type. Curious, I counted the words on two or three pages at random, finding them to average about three hundred and seventy-five words each.

The narratives contained in the first book, being personal accounts from the early years of Alhazred’s own career of various uncanny experiences and magical or occult experiments, did not occupy me for very long. I soon turned to the page at which Dr. Armitage had inserted the first marker, which was page 177, midway into Book IV. and began slowly to translate the old Latin, with considerable help from a crumbling, yellowed manuscript of Dee's English version of the same passage, which Dr. Armitage had set out for me and which I was often forced co consult on some of the more-difficult parts. The page read as follows, as best as I can recall:

There is no curse that has no cure and no ill against which no remedy exists. The Elder Gods dwell remote and aloof from the affairs of men, yet They have nut abandoned us to the wrath of Them from Outside and Their abominable minions: for within the five-pointed star carven of gray stone from ancient Mnar lies armor against witches and demons, against the Deep Ones, the Dholes, the Voormis, the Tcho-Tcho, the Abominable Mi-Go, the Shoggoths, the Valusians, and all such peoples and beings who serve the Great Old Ones and Their spawn; but it is less potent against the Great Old Ones Themselves. He who possesses the five-pointed star shall find himself able to command all beings who creep, swim, crawl, walk, or fly, even to the Source from which there is no returning. In the land of Yhe as in great R’lyeh, in Y'ha-nthlei as in Yoth, in Yuggoth as in Zothique, in N’kai as in K'n-yan, in Kadath-in-the-Cold-Waste as at the Lake of Hali, in Carcosa as in Ib, it shall have power; but even as the stars wane and grow cold, even as suns die and the spaces between the stars grow more great, so wanes the power of all things—of the five-pointed star-stone as of the spells put upon the Great Old Ones by the benign Elder Gods: and there comes a time, as once there was a time, when it shall be shown that:

But the time is not yet come, and still the star-stone from Mnar, marked with that sigil that is the Elder Sign, holds strong against the rage of Them it prisons, and against the wiles of those servants and minions who would set their masters free.

This passage, I must confess, meant but little to me. I had seen “Mnar” and “the Elder Sign” mentioned in the copy of von Junzt I had been reading on the train, but I had no inkling as to what these terms were supposed to mean.

The second passage which Dr. Armitage had marked with a slip of paper came a bit earlier in the volume, about midway through the seventeenth chapter of Book III, commencing on page 142. Recalling that Cryptic note in Dr. Blaine’s hand, Cf. NEC. III. xvii, which I had noticed in the Xothic file, I realized with some excitement that this must be the key and central reference to which he had with such urgency directed my attention. It was considerably lengthier than the other entry, so I copied it out on the sheaf of notepaper which Dr. Armitage had so thoughtfully supplied, and studied it later during my homeward journey to such an extent that my memory retains it word for word. It went thusly:

Of the coming-down of the Great Old Ones from the stars, it is written in the Book of Eibon that the first who came hither was the black thing, even Tsathoggua, who came hence from dim Cykranosh not long after the creation of life on this planet. Not through the starry spaces came Tsathoggua, but by the dimensions that lie between them, and of his advent upon this planet, the place thereof was the unlitten and subterraneous gulf of N’kai, wherein whose gloomy depths he lingered for innumerable cycles, as Eibon saith, before emerging into the upper world. And after this it was the Great Cthulhu came hither next, and all his Spawn from distant Xoth, and the Deep Ones and the loathsome Yuggs who be their minions; and Shub-Niggurath from nightmare-rumored Yaddith, and all they that serve her, even the Little People of the Wood.

But of the Great Old Ones begotten by Azathoth in the prime, not all came down to this Earth, for Him Who Is Nor To Be Named lurks ever on that dark world near Aldebaran in the Hyades, and it was his sons who descended hither in his place. Likewise, Cthugha chose for his abode the star Fomalhaut, whereupon he begat the dread Aphoom Zhah; and Cthugha abideth yet on Fomalhaut, and the Fire-Vampires that serve him, but as for Aphoom Zhah, he descended to this Earth and dwelleth yet in his frozen realm. And terrible Vulthoom, that awful thing that be brother to black Tsathoggua, he descended upon dying Mars in his might, which world he chose for his dominion ....

I could not help shuddering at the incoherent raving of the madman who had broken the silence of the ages, to speak of such abominations. But the passage held little that I had not already learned, so I skipped on down the page until my attention was arrested by the following passage:

Now it is also written of those of the Begotten of Azathoth who abide not within the secret places of the Earth, that when the Great Old Ones came down from the stars in the misty prime They brought the image and likeness of their brethren with Them. In this wise, it was the Outer Ones that serve Hastur the Unspeakable, brought down the Shining Trapezohedron from dark Yuggoth on the Rim, whereupon had it been fashioned with curious art in the days ere the Earth had yet brought forth its first life. And it was through the Shining Trapezohedron, that is the very talisman of dread Nyarlathotep, that the Great Old Ones summoned to Their aid the might of the Crawling Chaos in the hour of Their great need, what time the Elder Gods came hither in Their wrath.

Likewise, it was the Deep Ones who carried to this world the awful likeness of serpent-bearded Byatis, son of Yig, whereby was He worshipped, first by the shadowy Valusians before the advent of man on this planet, and yet later by the dwellers in primal Mu ....

This, obviously, was the information Dr. Blaine had desperately urged me to read. True, it corroborated the information I had already learned in the quotation from Ludvig Prinn, included in the Copeland notes. I read on, and with mounting excitement.

For the Great Old Ones had foreseen the day and the hour of their need, when that they must summon to Their side those of their awesome Brethren who had taken far worlds for the place of their abiding, and had brought hither these images for this very purpose. Now of these star-made eidola, little there is that is known to men; it is said they were wrought by strange talismanic art, and that the sorcerers and the wizards of this terrene sphere are not deemed worthy by the Great Old Ones to be instructed in the secrets thereof.

But it is whispered in certain old, forbidden books an awesome power lurks within such images, and that through them, as through windows in time and space, Those that dwell afar can sometimes be evoked, as They were when that it came to pass, in the fullness of time, the Elder Gods descended on this world in their wrath.

My hands were trembling as I laboriously copied our this passage, translating it roughly into English; and my brows were beaded with cold globules of perspiration. For I knew I stood on the very threshold of the hidden truth I had come so far to discover. I read on, no longer quite able to dismiss these chaotic passages as the disgusting spewings of a diseased brain:

And there be those that worship the Great Old Ones through their image and likeness, but of this ye must be wary, for such eidola be uncanny, and betimes are known to drink the lives of they that handle them unwisely, or who seek through such images to summon to this sphere Those far-off and better left undisturbed. Neither is it wholly within the knowledge of men to destroy such images, and many there be that sought the destruction thereof, who found their own destruction; but against such images from beyond the stars the Elder Sign hath very great power, although ye must beware lest in the conflict betwixt That which you evoke to destroy and the likeness of That which slumbereth afar, you be not consumed and swallowed up, or be yourself destroyed thereby, and that utterly, even to your immortal soul.

I stared at the words I had hurriedly rendered into English, my mind numb with a haunting surmise.

VII.

IT was some little while after this that Dr. Armitage returned to his office, accompanied as before by Dr. Seneca Lapham, and also by a youngish man of about my own age who was introduced to me as Mr. Winfield Phillips, an assistant of Dr. Lapham’s.

I came slowly out of my trance and fumbled with words, striving to return young Phillips’ amiable greeting in a natural manner. Dr. Armitage observed my bemused condition with one keen glance, and smiled grimly.

“I perceive, young man, that you have taken a bit of a shock. Tush, boy, don’t be ashamed—better men than you or I have been unsettled by things they found in the nightmarish pages of Alhazred! It is a book that should never have been written: having been written, it is a book that deserves burning—and I say this in all solemnity, I, a scholar, a man who loves books and who serves them. But the world is not conducted for our pleasure, young Hodgkins—as the reader of the Necronomicon very soon discovers!"

I regarded the old gentleman in a bemused manner. The implications of his words were, well—frightening. From his sympathetic manner, and the import of his remarks, I deduced that there was after all a certain element of profound and terrible cosmic truth lurking behind these ancient and darkling myths. Already had I half-convinced myself of this in my own mind, for all the apparent madness of the notion; to hear it soberly confirmed from another opened yawning gulfs and fissures in the comfortable pattern of ordinary life wherein I had spent my days heretofore—gulfs whereby one might glimpse gigantic and hideously suggestive Shapes which slithered and crept and hid behind the mask and sham of so-called "reality." The very next words which the librarian uttered proved my half-fears beyond a doubt.

"Yes, young Hodgkins, it is more than merely an old, forgotten, primitive mythology we are dealing with here, but something infinitely more real and ghastly and strong," the old man said soberly. He glanced at Dr. Lapham and the younger man, Phillips. "All of us in this room have had some experience with the terrible truth behind these old superstitions, so we have all come to the juncture at which you now stand; and we understand the feelings which you must be suffering right now. Be at ease, young fellow: You are among friends.”

Dr. Lapham cleared his throat at this point and spoke up in quiet, measured tones.

"You must understand, sir, that exactly how much truth lies behind these chaotic old legends we do not, at present, know. And that the legends themselves, and the books which remain our primary records on this matter, were concocted by superstitious and primitive minds unacquainted with the sophisticated concepts of modern physics and astronomy is evident. We cannot, as yet, take the legendary account seriously, as exact and literal statements of historical or scientific fact. We must look behind the legends, interpreting them according to the light of modern knowledge.”

“Quite right,” Armitage agreed. “We are not dealing with gods or demons or supernatural forces, my boy—clear all that mystical rubbish out of your head! Whatever the so-called Old Ones are, and whatever the nature and extent of their powers, they are neither divine nor infernal. And, surely, there is nothing of supernatural about them. I have found that it helps to conceive of them as extraterrestrial creatures, the former inhabitants of other planets or star systems, who came here ages ago and who now slumber in the far places of the globe in something akin to suspended animation, as with Cthulhu himself, for instance. Alhazred speaks of this monster as 'asleep and dreaming.' This is a decently accurate description of a state of vitality in stasis, when you consider that Alhazred lacked the proper scientific terminology to describe such a condition. And also let me point out that highly intelligent though these creatures undoubtedly are—to have been able to traverse somehow the immense stellar distances—they are not remotely manlike and suffer from none of the limitations of our own fragile and short-lived fleshly habitations. We have considerable evidence to suggest they are not even composed of the same kind of matter as we are, and share few, if any, of our senses. Their normal lifespan, perhaps, is to be measured in geological epochs, rather than in the biblical three score years and ten.”

By this time my mind was whirling with confusion, as you may well imagine. Struggling to conquer my revulsion at these stark and unpalatable facts, and to think clearly, I stammered our some query to the effect of how such creatures might be destroyed. Dr. Armitage looked troubled.

"We have come to the reluctant conclusion, young man, that they cannot in fact be destroyed. If they were capable of death or destruction, doubtless the opposing race, the so-called ‘Elder Gods’, would have slain or destroyed them, rather than imprisoning or banishing them, as all pertinent texts agree was their ultimate disposition. However, incapable of dissolution as they seem to be, the peculiar structure of the unknown types of matter of which they are composed seems to include a built-in defect—an Achilles’ heel, if you will. That is to say, some unknown and immeasurable form of radiation, or fields of force, apparently has the power to inhibit them profoundly. Let me show you."

He went over to a large veneer filing cabinet, such as we used back at the Institute for the storage of small and frangible artifacts, and drew our a flat tray lined with velvet, which he brought back to the desk. A large number of small mineral objects were displayed on the velvet-lined tray; these were bits of dark gray stone or crystalline mineral, each of which was in the shape of a conventional five-pointed star. I could not, at first, make out whether these stone objects were natural or manufactured, but in the center of some of them had been cut an oval symbol or design like an Egyptian cartouche. This carved symbol seemed emblematic of the human eye, or so it looked to the casual glance. The objects, or artifacts, varied in size from starshaped stones so small that you might have covered them with a ten-cent piece, to ones large enough to be the size of the hand with fingers outstretched. Only the larger ones bore the central eye-like cartouche.

“Go ahead, handle them if you like, they are harmless to beings composed of normal terrene matter,” Dr. Armitage urged. I took up one of the stones and hefted it curiously in my palm. To the touch it was slick and smooth and cold, resembling crystal; but the stony substance was opaque, and surprisingly heavy. Heavier, I would say, than flint or ironstone; almost as heavy as a similarly sized piece of lead would have been. To the touch the stone gave off the faintest, almost imperceptible, tingle, as if it were somehow imbued with a slight electrical charge. No geologist, I was baffled at the nature of the composition of the thing.

“You know what these are, of course?” asked Armitage.

“One of the star-stones from Mnar, I guess," I said, shrugging, "as described in the passages from the Necronomicon I have just been reading.”

“Precisely! Or such, at least, is our own supposition," nodded Armitage. "These were found in the northeastern parts of Mesopotamia, in a region we suspect but cannot prove to have been the approximate site of ancient Mnar. As yet, no trace of an urban site has been found, but subsequent excavations may yet unearth one—either the city of Sarnath or of Ib, as the urban centers are named in Alhazred. Literally hundreds of these star-stones have thus far been unearthed, scattered along a wandering southerly route which seems to have been that followed by some ancient migration—"

"Obviously the route followed by the Kishite migration," suggested Lapham. "Alhazred’s fourth book describes how the followers of the prophet Kish fled from Sarnath before its destruction, bearing the star-stones as a means of protection given them by the Elder Clods—"

"Yes, yes,” said Armitage gruffly, “but we are back dealing with mythology again, my dear Lapham, and none of these matters have yet been satisfactorily established. There may never have been a city such as Sarnath, or a prophet named Kish, save in legend: all we know is that the scar-stones truly exist, because we have found them.”

"Oh, very well, you doubting Thomas!" chuckled Lapham. “Bur at least we know that the star-stones and their powers against the Old Ones were known and used from very ancient times. Miskatonic’s 1910 expedition to Mesopotamia found ample evidence that the star-stones had been dug up time and again, over the ages—some of the excavations suggested Assyrian and Babylonian dates, others early dynastic Egyptian and even medieval Persian. It is quite obvious that many peoples throughout antiquity knew of the protective properties of the stones from Mnar, and dug them up as defenses against the monsters of Alhazredic demonology—"

At that point, just as the discussion seemed on the brink of degenerating into an abstruse, and rather acerbic, scholarly dispute, young Winfield Phillips diplomatically suggested we all go down to the faculty dining hall for luncheon.

THE dining hall was spacious and well appointed, the walls paneled in native oak, hand-rubbed to a glowing patina, and adorned with stiff, formal portraits of elderly professors of the university. We lunched on what appeared to be a traditional New England dish, clam chowder. Never having tasted the succulent stew before, as it is seldom served in Southern California, I was curious and also a trifle cautious; needless to say, I found it delicious.

Seneca Lapham and Henry Armitage argued over the meal as to the mode whereby the star-stones might be employed to nullify the malign influences radiated by, or centered within, the Ponape figurine. It seemed from this discussion that a considerable portion of their knowledge of the Alhazredic demonology was, after all, merely conjectural or theoretical. Dr. Lapham was of the opinion that simply placing the stone from Mnar in close proximity to the jade idol would counteract or negate its noxious influences. The silver-haired librarian, however, demurred: He voiced his opinion that the star-stone must be employed in some manner of ritual in order to render the statuette harmless. Young Winfield Phillips had little to offer to either side of the debate, and devoted himself largely to the steaming broth before him.

That afternoon, Dr. Lapham having canceled a scheduled lecture, we spent huddled together in the rare books room of the great library, poring over Alhazred, du Nord, Prinn, d’Erlette, Shrewsbury, and the other main authorities on this weird, uncanny mythology. If any such ritual as the one about which Armitage theorized actually existed, it was not to be found in the major reference works to hand.

I fretted the hours by, worried that my long journey into northern New England had been in vain, fearing that every passing hour brought us and our world closer to the moment when the directors of the Sanbourne Institute might casually and unknowingly decide to exhibit the figurine publicly. When and if this occurred no one could precisely say what horrible and malignant menace might thereby be unloosed on an unsuspecting and helpless mankind. The nature of the danger poor mad Dr. Blaine feared and dreaded was still unknown to us.

That evening, as I strolled home through the bitter and wintry streets to my room at the club, my mind was a seething turmoil of shapeless fears and inarticulate terrors. I did not know what it was that I could do to avert the immense and shadowy peril which hung over us all. I only knew that I must do—something. But—what?

A corner newsstand caught my eye; I paused to buy a copy of the evening paper. Later, in my cozy room, dozing over the paper in the easy-chair, I awoke suddenly with a start. Without voluntary action my gaze fell on the open but unread newspaper spread across my lap. One black headline grew and grew in my sphere of sight until it blotted out all else.

“CURSED” IDOL TO BE SHOWN TO PUBLIC FOR 1ST TIME

Mistery Statue Goes on Display Monday in Calif.

Monday! And this was Friday evening! With all the luck and speed in the world, and the most perfect traveling connections, I could not possibly reach Santiago in time to prevent it.

VIII.

AT noon the next day, March 22nd, Armitage and Lapham bade me their anxious farewells at the railway station. I had hurriedly composed and sent off a telegram to the directors the night before, begging them to postpone until my return the unveiling of the Ponape figurine. Alas, they would think me as deranged as poor Dr. Blaine if I dared hint at my reasons for asking this delay. The best I could do to give them a valid reason for removing the figurine from the South Gallery, and returning it to the relative security of the safe in the Curator's office, was to state (quite erroneously, of course) that I had discovered new information which proved the idol to be a hoax.

I hoped—but could not be certain—that this would be sufficient. They were prudent and cautious men, I knew, who would go to extreme lengths to avoid getting the Institute mixed up in anything disreputable or shady. On the other hand, they were vitally interested in the continued success and popularity of the Institute; and public curiosity in the mystery image, fanned to a blaze by reportorial sensationalism, was at a white heat. To display the figurine would lure the public in droves, as they well knew.

My only hope lay in the possibility that their prudence would outweigh their desire for heavy popular attendance.

“Farewell, my boy,” said Dr. Armitage, clasping my hand in his firm grip. His fine, aristocratic features looked strained and worried, and his keen blue eyes were shadowed with anxiety. "Let us hope that you are in time ... and that our small gift proves useful, after all!"

The "gift" of which he spoke weighed heavily in the left-hand inner breast pocket of my suit at that very moment.

I exchanged farewells, thanking Armitage and Lapham for their kindly interest, concern and generosity. Then I climbed aboard and followed the porter, laden with my bags, to the compartment. One last wave from the steam-fogged window at the two overcoated figures and they vanished behind me in the surge and clamor of departure.

OF my long trip homeward there is little enough to say. Hour by hour, mile by mile, I retraced my way across the breadth of the continent. Again I changed trains in the drafty, echoing Boston terminal; again I stared unseeingly for hours as the monotonous towns and hills, cities and suburbs, fields and plains rushed past my window.

Again, I strove to pass the hours by studying the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Von Junzt proved to have little light to shed upon the mysteries of the star-shaped stone from elder Mnar, although he discussed it in several places, discoursing learnedly and at tiresome length upon its supposed efficacy against the Alhazredic demons. He seemed to have been principally concerned in settling by scholarly allusion and quotation that the so-called "Elder Sign" and "Sarnath-sigil", as well as the "Sign of Kish", were all terms which referred to the same object, and that object was none other than the star-shaped artifact of unidentified gray stone from immemorial Mnar. Whether the Elder Sign was the star-stone itself, or merely the cartouchelike emblem carved on the larger specimens of the stone, was left unclear.

This emblem or sigil I studied under a small but powerful lens I had brought with me in my case of books and writing materials. It was a curious, archaic symbol, quite unlike any other primitive or prehistoric character or glyph known to me. Under the magnifying glass it proved to be an oval, broken at either end, with something in the middle like a tower or monolith of jagged lines; or perhaps it was supposed to represent a stylized tree. At any rate, the oval cartouche with the vertical tower in its center resembled nothing so much as a cat’s eye, save that the vertical slit pupil was, as I have said, jagged-edged.

I wondered if the symbol was supposed to suggest a burning tower ... and was suddenly reminded of a phrase from that hellish jumble of nonsense in the Necronomicon's most confused and chaotic pages: "They came down Out of the star-spaces unto this Earth, so that They might deal a grim and heavy judgment upon their former servants; and They went to and fro upon the Earth, terrible in Their wrath, like unto mighty Towers of Flame that walked like Men. Yea and verily was it writ of old, Terrible be the Elder Gods in Their wrath in the Hour of Their coming-hence."

Like unto mighty Towers of Flame ... is that what the sigil on the starstones meant? Was it the seal and emblem of the Elder Gods? And did it depict Their very likeness?

My thoughts far from this place and time, I stared sightlessly from the railway carriage, through rain-swept windows blurred with steam, as the clicking wheels are up the miles.

WHILE my journey co Massachusetts had been made in a fairly leisurely manner, schedules and connections having been arranged with comfort and convenience in mind, my trip home was quite another matter. Every factor was sacrificed to speed; it mattered little whether I could connect with a train which afforded sleeping accommodations, or a private compartment, or even a dining car. Time was the one priceless commodity, and every other consideration gave way before its urgency.

As to my state of mind during the long journey home to Southern California, I can only say that it was one of confusion. Against the most lucid and cautious arguments of logic and reason, I more than half accepted the terrible, the dreadful, the transcendent truth behind the grim old myths of Cthulhu and his brethren and his horribly monstrous spawn.

I had always, since my earliest years, been something of a rationalist when it came to the mystical, a materialist when it came to matters of religion, and an agnostic in dealings with the supernatural and the supernormal. Gods, ghosts, devils, magic rites—these (thought I, smugly, to myself in my abysmal but "enlightened" ignorance) belonged to the childhood of the human race. Here in the modern Industrial Age, nearly three decades into the 20th century, we had little time or patience to waste on the mumbo-jumbo of outmoded superstitions and antiquated, dying creeds.

To find men of breeding and education, men of brilliant intellect and great scholastic learning, who cautiously but soberly admitted that such things could be shook the flimsy foundations of my own materialistic assumptions. The fabric of the universe, as envisioned by Newton and Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein, Darwin and Freud, suddenly showed bare and cracked patches, jury-rigged scaffoldings through whose rents and holes and lacunae yawned frightful abysses of eldritch horror and ancient unholy evil. When scholars like Armitage and Lapham—yes, and Blaine and Copeland, too—had been forced to admit the reality of the supernatural, or of the ultra-terrestrial, how could I cling to the shivered fragments of my own scientific faith?

In this mood of dawning comprehension and growing belief in horrors of the primal world unguessed at in even the darkest of myths and superstitions, I retraced my journey across the continent. And at last I approached Santiago.

IT was four o’clock in the morning of March 26th. A gray, overcast morning, wintry, rain-swept, and bleak. Cold and wet were the winds that blew in from the dark Pacific, in whose unknown depths fantastic survivals might lurk from the forgotten past of this ancient planet. My eyes were red from lack of sleep, my head throbbing with fatigue, my body shivering and tense with excitement. I woke a cabman sleeping behind the wheel of his dilapidated Ford, parked in front of the railway station, and bade him drive me to the Sanbourne Institute.

"Don’t open till nine, mister," he grumbled, yawning a jaw-cracking yawn. "Be all closed up at this hour."

I shook my head impatiently, climbing in the back sear and stuffing my luggage in beside me. "I work there, and I have a key. Let’s go!"

"Okay, okay, hold yer horses," he muttered and began fiddling with the choke. The old Ford coughed and gurgled, then woke sluggishly to wheezing, rattling life. We pulled away from the curb and drove through dark streets empty except for a dog, snuffling at garbage cans in front of the Cozy Oak Bar & Grille. And the fog ... the cold, soft, wet fog ... that curled and coiled and floated through the dim streets like the vaporous tentacles of some immense and shadowy sea-thing.

The Institute is built well back from the road at the juncture of Sanchez and Whiteman Streets on the far side of town, an exclusive section of big estate houses called Mar del Vista. Originally, the property and the building itself had been the home of Carlton Sanbourne II, who had inherited a tuna canning fortune from his famous millionaire father. At his death the house and grounds, as well as his own world-famous collection of Pacific antiquities, had been donated to the state under a self-perpetuating foundation which established the nucleus of the present museum.

It must have been half past four in the morning when the old rattletrap of a taxi drew up before the big wrought-iron gate and let me out. I paid the driver, tipped him handsomely, and watched him drive off in a cloud of swirling fog. Then I opened the gate with my key, entered, closed the huge swinging gates behind me, parked my luggage in the gate-keeper's cottage, and went hurriedly down the drive toward the main entrance.

I let myself in by a small, unobtrusive side door used by the staff members. The building was not kept lit by night, and the halls and display rooms were thus drowned in murky gloom from which massive primitive idols bulked monstrously, like the lurking denizens of some shadowy netherworld. Just enough of the thin gray light of pre-dawn came seeping in through the tall windows for me to find my way through the maze of rooms.

I headed directly for the South Gallery where the Copeland collection would be on display. It occurred to me to call out and attract the attention of our night watchman, a Mexican-American named Emiliano Gonzalez, but for some reason I held my tongue. I cannot explain my reason for not attracting his attention. Quite certainly, I had no presentiment of the situation into which I would suddenly enter: but there was something in the very air of the place, a strange tension, an oddly meaningful silence that was tomb-like, which impelled me to caution and silence.

I became aware that my heart was beating, lightly but rapidly, and that my palms were wet with perspiration. My breathing came in short, shallow panting: I was—frightened, but—of what? All about me were the familiar glass cases, wall hangings, and statues and carvings, just as I had seen them a thousand times before. Why I should feel tension and trepidation is something I cannot explain. All I can offer by way of explanation is the supposition that, by some ethereal sense beyond the physical five, I felt an uncanny and malignant force awake and alive within the dim precincts of the museum.

Suddenly I turned a corner and found myself at the entrance to the gallery that was my goal.

And I looked on—horror!

IX.

FROM this point on I must exercise great care and precision in my choice of words, so that I can describe exactly what I saw and felt.

The hall was long and broad and high-ceilinged. Tall windows gave forth a view of gloom-drenched gardens and grounds. Dawn was just breaking, and the gallery itself was dimly but adequately illuminated by a pervasive, colorless light.

The artifacts from the Copeland collection were ranked along the walls and in the long glass cases, with near tags or placards describing the provenance of each antiquity.

Directly before me—almost at my feet—lay the body of the watchman, face downward in a pool of blood. I knew at once, as if by sheer instinct, that the poor old man was dead. Something in the way he lay there, sprawled and crumpled, told me that the body was lifeless. It was like a bundle of clothing carelessly flung aside. Anything so rumbled and motionless could not possibly be alive; I did not need to see the way the back of his head was crushed in as if before the force of a brutal bludgeon, to know that the thing was a corpse.

I looked past the body ... to the very end of the hall.

The Ponape figurine stood atop a pedestal facing me eye to eye. It occupied a central position of importance in the gallery: All eyes would be drawn to it.

And it was alive.

Alive and sentient in a weird manner I find almost impossible to describe in clumsy words. The carved eyes glared with awful sentience. They were aware; aware and watchful ....

About the idol beat the radiations of a strange and nameless force. It was almost visible, almost palpable, that curious energy. You know how solid buildings seem to waver as waves of heat rise from the sunbaked pavement of a summer street. It was like that with the idol of Zoth-Ommog. The tall windows behind the idol quivered as if the very air were disturbed by a pulsing force emanating from the cold slick mass of carven stone.

The aura of force radiated outward from the idol; this was clearly visible. The ripples which distorted the background widened outward like the wavelets caused by a pebble tossed into still waters.

I sensed a tremendous force, a store of limitless cosmic energy, somehow locked within the fabric of the stone thing, as electrical energy is stored within a battery. And this force had now been—triggered. That which had slept dormant within the crystalline atoms of the cold stone was now violently active.

And there was something else. An intelligence—vast and deep and malignant—peered forth from the stone thing—a Mind, awesome and terrible, was now awake—aware—and watchful!

Suddenly, without volition on my part, there came into my mind the image of a page from that accursed and blasphemous Necronomicon I had so shudderingly perused back at Arkham ... and a single passage from that page stood out in my mental picture with clamorous and desperate clarity—

"It is whispered in certain old, forbidden books an awesome power lurks within such images, and that through them, as through strange windows in time and space. Those that dwell afar can sometimes be evoked and summoned hither ...

Even in the same moment that this scrap of ancient lore rang through my brain with irresistible urgency, my eyes wavered and fell before the carved glare of the stony thing. And I saw that which knelt before it—that which had struck down old Gonzalez, and now groveled in abasement before the Image from Beyond.

At the first glance it looked like an ordinary man, some sort of Polynesian or Mongoloid, perhaps a half-breed. The worshiper before the idol had greasy, copper-colored skin, a bloated, chinless face with goggling, muddy-colored eyes, a mere flattened slit of a nose. He was bundled in a suit of cheap clothing, such as merchant seamen might buy in a waterfront pawnshop for a night ashore, and his head was wrapped in a piece of dark greenish cloth that resembled some sort of turban. Curiously, his hands were covered with bulky mittens—

But there was something about him, something in the abnormality of his crouching posture, in the odd lumpish bulging of his body beneath the baggy suit, something in the squat, sagging, toad-like corpulence of his slumped, slope-shouldered form, which raised the hair at the nape of my neck, filled my dry mouth with sour bile, and sent raw, unnerving horror shrieking through my brain.

That and the smell of him—the mingled reek of salt water and nameless decay—

He slithered about, goggling eyes glaring frog-like into my own. One mitten-covered hand fished clumsily into a baggy pocket and came out clutching a revolver. Then he came to his feet in an indescribable, boneless wriggle and pointed the revolver at me. As he did so that loosely wrapped green turban came loose, and I saw, and shrieked aloud to see it, that he had no cars, no ears at all.

I had no weapon, but something hard and heavy pressed against my heart—something wrapped in silken cloth, which I had carried in my inside breast pocket all the way from Arkham. With a numb hand I dragged it out. Hung aside the wrappings and held it up—the gray stone starfish-shaped talisman from lost Mnar, which the followers of Kish had graven with the Elder Sign in time’s dim, dark dawn.

At the sight of the star-stone the greasy-skinned man in the baggy suit cried aloud—a glutinous, gobbling sound that I swear before God came never from a human throat—and flung his arms wide as if to shield the idol of his cosmic god from profanation.

And I flung the star-stone.

What happened next I lack the words to describe. But I will try.

The star-stone struck the hideous face of the idol. And both star-stone and idol vanished—vanished in a soundless glare of light—light that burnt blackly—light that was a negation of luminance, rather then luminance itself.

The air, sucked inward by the instantaneous destruction of matter, slapped against itself, ruffling the tapa cloth wall hangings. Then, in the next eye-blink of time, fiery lightning lanced from the vortex of nothingness where the idol had stood an instant before.

Jagged streaks of electric fire zigzagged through the room. Windows shattered outward; I was flung to the floor; the earth shook.

Lightning touched the barrel of the revolver held by the turbaned halfbreed who stood motionless as it transfixed. Touched and clung. And crawled over his bloated deformity of a body in scaring rivulets of electric flame.

He writhed once, with an indescribable liquidity of motion so undulant and boneless as to drive a thrill of pure horror through my brain. Then he sagged forward on the floor. He did not fall as a man falls, but slumped gradually, like a mass of liquescent jelly, losing shape and form.

A smell came to my nostrils, as of some putrescent decay transcending all other stenches in its vile and utter rottenness.

The hall was burning; black smoke whirled around me. I was numb from head to toe as if from a paralyzing shock; I tried to move but could not, and then my brain, which had looked upon the very brink of the Pit— and beyond—failed me. And I knew nothing more until I woke, hours later, on a white bed in Mercy Hospital.

They tell me that I have suffered second-degree burns and that I am temporarily paralyzed from nervous shock. The fools have moved me to the psychiatric ward, “for further examination" as they explain, soothingly. They tell me that I murdered poor old Gonzalez the night watchman, who came upon me while I was trying to steal or destroy the Ponape figurine; but they only smile unbelievingly and shake their heads when I tell them that it was not I, but the half-breed, did the deed. They ask me where I have hidden the figurine, and why I set fire to the South Gallery, and what happened to the blunt instrument with which they claim I bludgeoned poor Gonzalez to death. But they do not answer me when I ask them about the other body ... the body of the other man, damn it, the man who did the murder, the thing that looked and walked like a man ... why do they not tell me what became of the other man!

Addendum to the Statement of Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins of 34 Mission Street, Santiago, Cal. The above statement, as transcribed from shorthand notes by R.A. Wallis, public stenographer, on March 29, 1929, concludes at this point, for here the accused lost coherence, his speech trailing off into sobbing obscenities, whereupon he was given a strong sedative and returned to the violent ward of the psychiatric wing of Mercy Hospital, from whence he was later transferred to Dunhill Sanitarium, Santiago County, under the care of Dr. Harrington J. Colby. It is believed the accused will never sufficiently recover in order to stand trial.

Appended to the above statement are the coroner’s report on the body of the deceased, E. Gonzalez, and the psychiatric records of the accused. Also appended hereto: Report of Officer W. J. Whitby, the patrolman who discovered the body.

Extract from the Report of Officer J. Whitby:

2. Entered the premises at approximately 5:04 a.m. on the morning of 26 March, by forcible entry of main door. Section of premises later identified to me as South Gallery was ablaze at several points and windows at rear of hall were smashed. Used hall phone to summon Fire Department; partially extinguished blaze by means of equipment in stairwell.

3. Approximately 5:15 discovered two bodies: (1) deceased male of Spanish descent, approx. 60 yrs. old, in night watchman uniform; cause of death, injury to base of skull evidently caused by blunt instrument; (2) unconscious body of male Caucasian, approx. 30 yrs. old, suffering from effects of shock or smoke inhalation, or both.

7. Near base of fire-blackened empty stand at extreme end of hall, approx. 20 ft. from unconscious male Caucasian, I noticed a large pool or puddle of jelly-like fluid in copious quantities (several gallons). Nature of fluid unknown, but slimy in consistency and extremely offensive to the smell, like something long dead and rotten. Intermixed with said fluid I noticed sodden suit of clothing and something resembling pair of gloves or mittens. Unable to recover said garments, being driven from proximity to this part of South Gallery by heat of flames. Jelly-like fluid later found to have totally evaporated by time Fire Department had completely extinguished flames; clothing virtually destroyed, not burnt but rather dissolved into rags as if from immersion in acid of some kind. No bones or remnants of human flesh were discovered. Whatever it was, it melted away like a big jellyfish which decays rapidly when exposed to open air.

(Signed) W. J. Whitby. RD.

Badge # S/SC-104.

News item clipped from the Santiago County Sentinel, April 10. 1929:

"STATUE'S CURSE" CLAIMS FINAL VICTIM

Murder Suspect Ruled Insane

At a closed hearing at the Criminal Courts Building at ten o'clock this morning, Judge Maxwell J. Chase formally committed to Dunhill Sanitarium Mr. Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins of 34 Mission Street, this city, ruling him mentally incompetent to stand trial for the motiveless and brutal murder of Emil (sic) Gonzalez, also of this city. Gonzalez, an American citizen of Mexican descent, formerly employed as night watchman at the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities, was found bludgeoned to death in the early morning hours of March 26th of this year. Near the corpse was discovered the unconscious body of the murder suspect, Mr. Hodgkins, apparently suffering from nervous shock. This tragedy occurred in the South Gallery of the museum wing of the Institute, within 20 feet of the pedestal on which the notorious “Pbnape Figurine” had been on public display for the two days previous. ...

... County Psychiatric Officer Wilson then concluded with the opinion that Mr. Hodgkins was hopelessly insane and recommended that the Court commit the patient to Dunhill Sanitarium on a permanent basis. Judge Chase concurring, the commitment papers were signed in the presence of the three doctors. ...

... remains unsolved, as does the origin of the mysterious fire which raged unchecked for three quarters of an hour through the South Gallery. Also unsolved is the mystery of the disappearance of the infamous statuette itself, whose whereabouts remain unknown.