The Xothic Legend Cycle

Statement of Winfield Phillips, 1936

IN the event of my death or disappearance, I herewith request of the person into whose hands this statement shall come that he mail it without delay to Dr. Seneca Lapham, care of the Anthropology Department of Miskatonic University in the city of Arkham, Massachusetts. And, for his own safety, if not indeed his sanity of mind, I beg him to send it unread.

My name is Winfield Phillips, and I reside at number 86 College Street in Arkham. I am a graduate of Miskatonic University, where I majored in American literature and took for my minor the study of anthropology. Since my freshman year I have been in the employ of Dr. Lapham in the capacity of a private secretary, and have continued thereafter in that position in order to support myself while researching for a book on the Decadent movement in recent art and literature. I am twenty-nine years old, and consider myself to be sound of mind and body.

As for my soul, I am not so certain.

I.

ON the morning of June 7th, 1936, having obtained a brief leave of absence from my employer, I boarded the train for California at the B&O Station on Water Street. My purpose in undertaking a journey of such length as to traverse the entirety of the continent was partially business and partially pleasure. And, in part, from a sense of family duty.

Due to the recent death of my uncle, Hiram Stokely of Durnham Beach, California, I felt obligated to attend his funeral and to take my place at the obsequies in order that the eastern branch of the family might be represented on this solemn occasion. Uncle Hiram had been, after all, my mother’s favorite brother; and, even though I had never met him, had, in fact, never seen him to my knowledge, I knew that she would have wished me to attend his burial. My late mother was a Winfield of New Hampshire, but my father was a Phillips, sprung from ancient Massachusetts stock which can be traced back to 1670, if not further. I am a descendant of the celebrated, and ever so slightly notorious, Reverend Ward Phillips, former pastor of the Second Congregationalist Church in Arkham, author of an obscure but psychologically fascinating bit of New England eccentricity called Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan, first published at Boston in 1794 and later reprinted in rather expurgated form in 1801. It is an old family joke that the reverend doctor, in this his only known venture into the fine art of letters, literally did his “damnedest” to out-do in hellfire and brimstone mad old Cotton Mather’s hellish Magnalia and the even more nightmarish Wonders of the Invisible World. If so, he succeeded admirably.

Many years before I was born, there had been some sort of trouble between my Uncle Hiram and the rest of my mother’s family. I have never quite known what occasioned this breech, but the breaking-off of relations was lasting and permanent. If my mother ever knew the reason, she never confided it to me, but I can remember my aged grandfather muttering about "forbidden practices" and “books no one should ever read” whenever Uncle Hiram’s name came up, which was not very often. Whatever the nature of the family scandal, Uncle Hiram moved away from Arkham, went to California, and never returned. These ancient, inbred New England families, as you may be aware, are rife with skeletons in the closet, old feuds, centuried scandals. It seems quaint, even perverse, nowadays to bear a grudge for a lifetime, but we are a proud, stubborn, stiff-necked race. Just how still-necked we are can be demonstrated by the fact that my uncle, as if not content with severing all relations with the family (even with my mother, who was his favorite sister), actually repudiated the family name, Winfield, adopting instead his mother’s maiden name, Stokely.

At any rate, all of this happened long before I was born—before my Mother married into the Phillips family, in fact—and because of this, and of the fact that no single communication had ever passed between my uncle and myself, I had no slightest thought of ever being mentioned in my uncle's will, and had as well utterly no interest in his estate, although it was commonly known that he had become immensely wealthy since moving to distant California.

As for the element of pleasure involved in my journey, this lay in the opportunity to resume a cherished friendship with my cousin, Brian Winfield, the only son of my other uncle, Richard. We had first met, Brian and I, quite by chance, in the Widener Library at Harvard in 1927. I had been sent there by my employer to copy out some passages from a certain very rare version of a curious old volume of myths and liturgies called the Book of Eibon, since Harvard was lucky enough to possess the only known text of the medieval Latin translation made from the Greek by Philippus Faber. The young man seated next to me, a cheerful, freckle-faced, snub-nosed fellow with tousled sandy hair and friendly blue eyes, deep in a medical book of the most repulsive illustrations imaginable, responded to the librarian’s call of "Winfield" and ambled forward to claim another book just fetched up from the stacks for his perusal. Thinking he must certainly be a relative. I took the liberty of introducing myself: later, chatting over coffee, we laid the foundations of a lasting friendship.

Brian was about five years younger than myself and had come east to study at the medical school, hoping to become a doctor. We both took to each other from the start, both equally delighted to discover we were cousins. Although my stay was a brief one, we managed to continue our friendship on weekends and during vacations. On these occasions I had come to the dorm to visit him, since his father had made him swear never to venture a foot closer to Arkham than the Boston city limits.

This afforded me no particular discomfort in traveling, of course, since Boston and Arkham are only some fifteen miles apart. But after some two years my visits to Boston had to end, for Brian flunked out of medical school because of some ridiculously boyish prank, and he went home to live again with his parent. He later studied veterinary medicine at Tate College in Buford, the county scat of Santiago County, in which Durnham Beach is located, and became a licensed veterinarian. I suppose this was quite a come-down for one who had hoped to cure cancer and win the Nobel Prize; or perhaps his father, discovering our surreptitious correspondence, demanded that it cease. At any rate, our exchange of letters dwindled and died. An infrequent card at Christmases or birthdays, and that was about it.

Until this June, when suddenly and to my delight I found in my mailbox a brief, scribbled letter in his familiar, childish hand, informing me of our uncle’s death and inviting—virtually begging—that I come west for the funeral. I did not need much urging, and, as Dr. Lapham was willing to dispense with my services for a week or so, I went our that very afternoon and purchased my railway tickets, informing Brian by telegraph of the time of my arrival.

Besides the pleasure of resuming my acquaintance with Brian, and the family duty of attending my uncle's funeral, I had also a bit of unfinished business to clean up on behalf of Dr. Lapham. A few miles north of Durnham Beach, on the coast of Southern California, lay the town of Santiago, in which the famous Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities was situated. About seven years earlier we had been visited at Miskatonic by a gentleman named Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, the assistant curator of the manuscripts collection at the Sanbourne Institute. This earnest and scholarly young man had implored the assistance of Dr. Lapham and certain of his colleagues in unraveling an ancient mystery which I shall not go into here, save that it involved the necessary destruction of a rare primitive idol of unknown craftsmanship, found off Ponape some decades earlier. Possession of this peculiar statuette—which gained considerable notoriety in the popular press under the rather melodramatic name of the “Ponape figurine”— was already reputed to have driven two famous scientists mad, and from Hodgkins' agitated state, threatened to unhinge his own reason as well.

Rather to my surprise. Dr. Lapham took these ravings quire seriously indeed, as did Dr. Henry Armitage, the librarian at Miskatonic. It is a measure of their concern over the potential danger to mankind in the continued existence of this so-called Ponape figurine that the two of them placed at young Hodgkins' use the fabulously rare copy of a grim, blasphemous old book called the Necronomicon, of which Miskatonic owns and jealously guards in a locked vault the only known copy of the "complete edition" of the book known to exist in the western hemisphere.

This book, and several other volumes of similar rarity and esoteric lore, form the central source of information the world possesses on an obscure, very ancient, and bafflingly widespread prehistoric mythology called by some the "Alhazredic demonology", from the name of the Necronomicon's Arabic author, and by others the “Cthulhu Mythos", from the appellation of its most celebrated devil. Traces of the Cthulhu cult, and of other cognate cults and secret societies devoted to the worship of Cthulhu’s three sons, Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog, as well as his half-brother, Hastur the Unspeakable, and other gods or demons with names like Tsachoggua, Azathorh, Nyarlathotep. Daoloth. Rhan Tcgoch, Lloigor, Zhar, Ithaqua, Shub-Niggurath, and so on, have persisted for ages in the far corners of the world, and are not yet entirely extinct. Linked together into a vast secret network, a sort of “occult underworld", the Cthulhu cult and its minions form, in the opinions of some authorities, little less than an enormous, and age-old, criminal conspiracy against the safety, the sanity, and the very existence of mankind.

Dr. Lapham and Dr. Armitage asked me, while visiting Santiago, where Brian was currently employed, to look into the mysterious end of Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins. He had cruelly bludgeoned an old watchman to death, set fire to the South Gallery of the museum wing of the Institute, hidden or destroyed the noxious figurine, and had been hauled off raving mad to the local sanatarium.

It would seem that there was considerably more to this wild story than one might reasonably have assumed. While assisting Dr. Lapham in his investigations of the activities of the Cthulhu cultists I have undergone a few unnerving and scientifically inexplicable experiences myself. I knew, although I tried nor to believe, that there was in fact a hard, grim kernel of truth behind the nightmarish legends of this fantastic mythology. I saw enough in Billington’s Wood that dark day in 1924 when Dr. Lapham and I shot and killed Ambrose Dewart and his Indian bodyservant, Quamis—or whomever it really was had taken over their minds, bodies, and souls—to treat these matters with caution and trepidation.

Something had driven poor Hodgkins mad. The Ponape figurine? Or what he saw in the instant in which he touched to the cold slick jadeite of the figurine the gray star-stone talisman from lost, immemorial Mnar which Dr. Armitage had entrusted to him? I did not know. But Lapham and Armitage wanted desperately to find out; they wanted to close their file on the weird and unearthly statuette they believed had come down from the black yawning gulfs between the stars when the Earth was young.

And so did I.

II.

BRIAN was there to greet me at the Santiago railway station when the train pulled in. Hatless, his sandy hair tousling in the breeze, he waved and grinned and thrust his broad shoulders through the crowd to crush my hand in his clumsy, powerful grip. He had changed very little in the years since we had last seen each other: he was still loud and boyish and irrepressible, with that joyous zest in life and boundless store of physical energy I admired and envied so much.

Collecting my bags, he tossed them into the back seat of his car, a sporty red roadster, and bade me pile in. I had been just as willing to have employed the dilapidated old taxi which was pulled up before the station, bur this was even more comfortable an arrangement. While we drove to Brian’s little apartment on Hidalgo Street, just off the park, we talked, renewing our acquaintance.

"Tomorrow, I'd like to motor down to Durnham Beach, so we can explore Uncle Hiram’s house," said Brian as he helped me unpack. "The lawyers gave me the key to the front door, and directions on getting there."

"Haven't you ever seen it?" I asked. “Living so close to our uncle, all these years ...."

He grimaced. “Unde Hiram didn’t get along with my dad any better than he got along with the rest of the family, I guess! Anyway, I never got invited down. Queer old bird he must have been, but not a bad sort, after all. By the way—I didn’t get around to mentioning it before—did you know that you and I are his beneficiaries?"

I blinked, fairly thunderstruck. “Do you mean it?”

He grinned, nodding. “Everything but the money, I'm afraid! That goes to some sort of foundation. But we can split the house, the library and furnishings. Reckon you’ll be most interested in the books ... I understand our uncle had quite a library. Well, come on; let’s wash up and get something to eat.”

III.

THE events of the following morning I will pass over without comment.

There were only a few people at the services, a couple of our uncle’s old servants and a curiosity-seeker or two. The burial was done rather hastily, and I noticed it was a closed-casket service, for some reason.

After lunch, we motored down the coast. It was a brisk, bright day, and Brian drove with the top down. I could tell Brian had some news for me—he was fairly bursting with it. Finally, I asked him what was up. He gave me a mischievous sidewise glance.

"Remember, when you wrote you were coming, you asked me to find out anything I could about that 'Ponape figurine' affair?" he asked. I nodded. "Well, I got together some newspaper clippings for you—give them to you later. But I discovered something positively weird while looking into the matter ..."

And he mentioned the name of the late Professor Harold Hadley Copeland. Time was, what with all the newspaper sensationalism connected with that name, it would instantly have been familiar to the reader of Sunday supplements. Bur how swiftly yesterday’s news becomes ancient history! I suppose few people would even recognize the name nowadays, although his death in a San Francisco mental institution was only some-seven years ago.

It had been Professor Copeland who had discovered the notorious Ponape figurine, which formed the nexus about which so many strange and baffling mysteries had centered. The figurine had been part of the collection of rare Pacific antiquities and books which Copeland had left to the Sanbourne Institute in 1928. It seems that the figurine was in some way connected to an ancient, little-known cult which worshiped "Great Old Ones from the stars", whose myths and legends were presumably recorded in a number of old, seldom-found books. Several of these books Copeland had left to the Sanbourne institute, as they bore upon the matter of his research. What I now learned from the lips of my cousin thoroughly astounded me.

"The old prof had a copy of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, did you know?" asked Brian, teasingly, playing with my curiosity.

I nodded. The book, by a German scholar named von Junzt, was a principal rext in the study of the cult.

"And some pages from the Yuggya Chants" he added, “and a copy of something called the R’lyeh Text—”

“Yes, I know all about that," I said impatiently. “Get on with it, won’t you?"

"Well, Win, where do you suppose Professor Copeland got these rare books from in the first place?"

I shrugged, irritably. "How the devil should I know?"

Still smiling, Brian dropped his bombshell. “He bought them from Uncle Hiram."

I’m sure my jaw must have dropped, making me look ludicrous, for after another sidewise glance, Brian began chuckling.

“Great Scott.” I murmured, "what a coincidence! D'you mean to say our uncle was interested in occultism—in this Alhazredic demonology?"

He frowned, not recognizing the term. "’Alhazredic’—?”

“After the Arabic demonologist, Abdul Alhazred. author of the celebrated Necronomicon, one of the rarest books in the world. We have a copy back at Miskatonic, kept under lock and key. The only one in the western hemisphere.”

He confessed that he had no idea about our uncle’s interests, scholarly or otherwise. "Bur Uncle Hiram made a fortune, you know ... and he went in for book-collecting in a big way ... anything old and rare and obscure and hard to find was just his meat. He had purchasing agents all over the world working for him ... say, bet that sounds good to you, since you’ve inherited your pick of his books!"

I didn’t say anything, feeling a bit uncomfortable. While my Uncle Hiram’s death had meant nothing at all to me personally, there is something a trifle ghoulish about profiting from another man's demise. I changed the subject.

The long drive down to Durnham Beach took us by a scenic route which disclosed frequent glimpses of the rugged, rocky coast, with the smiling blue Pacific lazing beyond under clear sunlight. But, as we approached the town, the highway turned inland, and the scenery became by gradual stages oddly drab and even depressing. We passed acres of scrub pine and mud flats full of stagnant, scummed water. Then followed, for dreary miles, abandoned farms and fields where the raw, unhealthy earth, eroded by the salt breeze from the ocean, exposed beneath pitifully thin layers of topsoil nothing but dead and sterile sand. Sea birds honked and cried mournfully, as if to fit the mood of uneasy depression that had fallen over us both. Even the clear sunlight seemed vitiated and dull, although the skies were as clear as ever.

I said something about this to my cousin, and he nodded soberly.

“It’s not a very healthy place,” he remarked. "Town’s been going downhill as far back as I can remember—especially when they started to close down the canneries and people were out of jobs. I can remember when all these farms were going strong, lots of orange groves, truck gardening ... some communities thrive and grow, and others just sort of crumble and go rotten at the heart ...."

We passed a roadsign and the name on it seemed vaguely familiar to me, like something I half-remembered reading years ago in the newspapers. I asked Brian about it. He looked grim.

“Hubble’s Field? Sure, you must have read about it—ten or fifteen years ago, something like that. They found all those bodies buried there—hundreds, I think it was.”

His remark sent a shiver of cold apprehension through me. Of course, I remembered the Hubble’s Field atrocity—who could forget it? The county was putting in a pipeline for some reason, and when they came to excavate a certain stretch of condemned property, they began to dig up the remains of human bodies, literally hundreds, as Brian said, although from the way the bodies were dismembered and jumbled together, it was never possible to ascertain an accurate count. Somebody on the radio at the rime remarked that if you took all of the mass murderers in history and put them together, you wouldn’t have half as many corpses as those found buried in Hubble’s Field ... oddly gruesome thing to remember! Or to think about.

"Yes, I remember something about it now," I murmured. “They never did find out who did it, or why, did they?”

Brian uttered a harsh little bark of laughter. "No, they didn't." he said shortly. “What they did find out, was that it had been going on for one hell of a long time ... the further down they dug, they began to find scraps of homespun and tanned leather and old bottles from the early settlers ... deeper down, bits and pieces of old Spanish armor were found mixed in with the skeletons ... and beneath that—”

He broke off, saying nothing. I nudged him.

"Beneath that—what?''

“Indians,” he said heavily. “Lots of ’em. Infants, old people, braves, women. Way back before the Spaniards came. This was all Indian country once, of course. The Hippaway nation owned all these parts before the explorers came. Still some Hippaways around, on reservations in the mountains. But not anywhere around here, you can bet!"

“What do you mean?"

"Back in school I took a course in anthropology. Indian stuff Hippaways had a name for Hubble’s Field in their own language ... something like E-choc-lab, I think it was."

"What does it mean?" I inquired curiously.

His face looked stony. " 'The Place of Worms.' "

Suddenly the sunlight dulled, the sky seemed to darken, and the air around us became dank and unwholesomely chill. But when I glanced up, the sky was still clear and the sun shone brightly ... but seemed weirdly unable to warm the air.

I changed the subject.

IV.

WE arrived at our uncle’s house by late afternoon, after driving through what was left of the old town. Rows of dingy housing inhabited by whiskered, surly men and slatternly women and squalling brats ... storefronts shut and moldering into decay ... dirt streets cut with ruts, with scrub grass growing in many of them. And beyond the rotting wharves of the harbor, where only a small boat or two gave evidence of fishermen, loomed the abandoned warehouses and the crumbling canneries. It was hard to believe that this disintegrating ghost town had been a vigorous community in Brian's boyhood, only a dozen or fifteen years ago. It looked contaminated—poisoned, in some uncanny way—and slumping almost visibly into ruin.

“I'm certainly not surprised you’ve stayed away all of these years.” I murmured. “The wonder is, Uncle Hiram kept on. with all his money: I'd of moved to San Francisco or somewhere—anywhere but Durnham Beach!"

Brian grunted assent. "Still, the house is grand." he mused, looking it over. And I had to admit that it was. A two-story, rambling stucco structure in the Spanish hacienda style, with red-tile roofs and chimneys, ringed about with desolate gardens gone to seed and fishponds long dry, scummed with filth and rotting leaves.

"Doesn't look like he kept the place up in recent years," I remarked.

"No, it doesn't," he said. Then he pointed to a stretch of empty field bordering the property, beyond a row of dilapidated and dying palms. "Maybe he couldn’t," he added thoughtfully.

“What does that mean?"

He nodded to the empty fields: raw red clay, cut into ditches and hollows and gullies, stretched beyond the row of palms.

"Neighborhood sort of went to pot," he said sourly. "That is Hubble's Field ...!"

After a couple of cries, we opened the big front door with the keys from Uncle Hiram's lawyer and entered a dim, cool front hall. Suits of rusty armor stood beneath tattered banners and faded tapestries; a grand spiral staircase wound through the dimness into the upper reaches of the house. Dust lay thick and scummy on heavy, curved, antique furniture, and gusts of rain from some broken windows upstairs had turned the old carpet green with mildew.

The place had a cold, unlived-in feeling, despite its attempt at feudal grandeur. It looked like the reception hall in some high-class funeral parlor with pretensions toward Baroque.

"Well, we’re here," Brian grunted. “Let's look around—explore.” There were tall stained glass windows in the grand dining hall, whose heavy oak table must have seated twenty guests, if guests had ever been welcome here, and I had a queasy feeling they had not. Bronze statuary stood about on old sideboards and stone mantles, and there was quite a clutter of endtables and bric-a-brac, some fine pieces of old Indian pottery, Victorian art glass, ashtrays and brass pots. The air was musty and unwholesome, although the house had not really been closed chat long: Hiram Stokely had only recently died, after all—did he have something about open windows and fresh air?

Or did the breeze that blew across Hubble's Field, where hundreds and hundreds of corpses had rotted into the earth over centuries, bear with it the taint of some miasma, some pestilence so unholy, that even in the hot summer months, Hiram Stokely had preferred to stifle behind shut windows, rather than breathe it in?

It was a question to which I really desired no answer.

We found the library on the second floor, a huge room, lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. I didn’t really feel in the mood for evaluating my inheritance that gray and gruesome afternoon, bur ran my eye cursorily over the shelves. Tooled leather bindings held standard sets of Dickens, Thackeray. Scott, the Lake poets. Doubtless, a good second-hand book dealer in San Francisco could turn a tidy profit for me, if the damp and mildew hadn’t gotten to the books first.

"My God! What’s that?” ejaculated Brian in startled tones. He was staring at an oil painting which hung on the paneled wall beside the door. Dim with dust and neglect, its thickly scrolled gilt frame held a shocking scene I could not quite make out in the dim light.

Peering closer, I read the little brass plate attached to the bottom of the frame. “Richard Upton Pickman,” I murmured. "I’ve heard of him, Boston artist—"

Then I lifted my eyes to study the painting. With a distinct sense of shock I saw a dim, shadowy graveyard vault, stone walls slick with trickling moisture, pallid and bloated fungi sprouting underfoot; scores of obscenely naked, unwholesomely plump men and women, naked and filthy, with heavy clawed hands and a suggestion of dog-like muzzles about their sloping brows and distorted lower faces, were clustered about one who held a guidebook. What was so spine-chillingly ghastly about the grotesque painting was the uncanny, the virtually photographic realism of the artist's technique ... that, and the hellish expressions of hideous, gloating relish stamped on the fat features of the degenerate, the almost bestial, hound-muzzled faces ....

With a shudder of aversion, I dropped my gaze hastily from the oil, to scan the title of the picture.

" 'Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn,' " I read half-aloud.

Brian looked sick. "God, I’ll sell that abomination first off!” he swore feelingly. I didn't blame him: frankly, I’d have burned the grisly thing.

We decided to stay the night, since it would have taken us hours to drive back to Santiago. We’d driven past a dingy little diner near the docks on our trip through town, but, somehow, neither of us felt like retracing our path through those rutted streets lined with tottering, decaying tenements. In a mood of festive generosity, Brian’s landlady had packed us a large picnic lunch, which we had only nibbled at along the way, so we built a fire in a cavernous stone fireplace and wolfed down cold tea, ham and chicken sandwiches, and potato salad by the flickering orange light of the blaze. A thin, drizzly rain had started up; the skies were leaden and overcast; a mournful wind prowled and whimpered about the eaves. It was going to be a filthy night, and neither of us felt like crawling into bed after one look at damp, stale-smelling sheets and empty, drafty bedrooms. We fed the fire and curled up on a couple of sofas, wrapped in quilts found in an upstairs closet.

Brian was soon snoring comfortably, but I found myself unable to get relaxed enough to feel drowsy. Giving it up after a while. I stirred up the fire and lit an old hurricane lamp we'd found on the back porch, which still held plenty of oil. Then I went hunting through the shelves for something to read. Twain, Dumas, Balzac—all of the standard classics were too heavy for my gloomy mood, but surely, somewhere in among all of these thousands of embalmed masterpieces, Uncle Hiram must have tucked away a good thriller or a juicy detective story ....

On one of the lower shelves I noticed something odd: a row of books and pamphlets which stood behind the front row, which made me wonder if all of the bookshelves were built double ... or was this, perhaps, where Uncle Hiram had squeamishly concealed from casual public discovery a small, choice selection of "risque" Victorians? Grinning, I pried one of the volumes our and held it up to the light so char I could read the title.

It was Night-Gaunts, a novel by Edgar Henquist Gordon, published in London by Charnel House, Publishers—great heaven! I was holding in my hands an extremely rare and very valuable book. It was the first book Gordon had published and, probably because of what critics of the period had damned as its "excessive morbidity", had been a total failure, which was why the volume I held in my grasp was so sought-after by collectors of the bizarre and the fantastic.

Setting it down gently on the table, I removed the front row of books and began to take out and to examine one by one the hidden volumes they had concealed. The next one was also by Gordon, his privately published novel, The Soul of Chaos. This was followed by a rare copy of the obscure magazine Outré, the very issue which contained Gordon's famous first short story, “Gargoyle”. For my projected book on Decadence in literature I had studied a photographic copy of “Gargoyle”, obtained not easily and with considerable expenditure of time, and I remembered well its phantasmagoric lore of black cities on the outermost rim of space, where weird beings whisper unmentionable blasphemies from formless thrones that stand beyond the domain of matter.

The next volume was a slim volume of verse by Edward Pickman Derby entitled Azathoth and Other Horrors, into which I had also peered and which was a valuable first edition in a very desirable state. Paired with this was a second volume of verse, The People of the Monolith, by Justin Geoffrey; then came several crumbling and yellowed copies of Outré and another magazine called Whispers, which contained the famous tales of that extraordinary, overlooked young genius, Michael Hayward. But the next book was such an astonishing find that I virtually reeled backwards in slack-jawed amazement: It was the original, unpublished manuscript of Amadaeus Carson's notorious and legendary novel, Black God of Madness, which most authorities believed no longer to be in existence.

I had stumbled upon an amazing trove of literary treasures so fabulously rare as almost to be considered legendary.

Which made me wonder—it was only an idle, passing thought!—what other hidden treasures the house of Hiram Stokely might conceal.

V.

WHEN Brian woke to a gray and drizzly morning, and I shared with him the wonder and delight of my discoveries, he was considerably less enthralled than he might have been. I suppose it takes a liberal arts education with a deep interest in Decadent literature to appreciate fully the profundity of my discoveries, but, still, he could have showed a little more interest—!

"Pretty rare stuff, and really valuable, eh?" he mused, leafing through the bound manuscript of Black God of Madness.

“Some of these items are almost priceless,” I said. “The one you’re examining is not the only unpublished manuscript, either: Here’s what seems to be the authentic original manuscript of Simon Maglore’s celebrated, prize-winning poem 'The Witch is Hung', famous for its riot of wild imagery and eldritch color ... and here’s a gem: a true first edition of Halpin Chalmers’ arcane and recondite work, The Secret Watcher, another first edition from Charnel House in London.”

"Yes, and here’s another one," he muttered, looking through a slender pamphlet. "Visions from Yaddith, verses by Ariel Prescott. Charnel House, Publishers: London, 1927. I’ve heard of her; didn’t she die raving in a madhouse?"

"Yes; in Oakdeane," I said briefly. “And here's the notorious January 1922 issue of Whispers, which contains that famous—or infamous!—tale by Randolph Carter, 'The Attic Window.' This copy could be worth hundreds to the right collector; when the story appeared, it aroused such an outcry of revulsion that every known copy of that issue was withdrawn from the newsstands."

Brian was glancing through some magazines, flaking and yellowed with age. "Who was Phillip Howard?” he murmured curiously.

"The author of several short stories that would have delighted the soul of Poe and Bierce," I declared. " 'The House of the Worm' is probably the most notorious; at least one young reader, a student at Midwestern University, I believe, went insane because of it. Another of his tales is in one of the issues you’re looking at: 'The Defilers', it’s called; I remember an article in the Partridgeville Gazette as claiming the magazine received no fewer than three hundred and ten letters of outraged indignation when they published that tale."

"Didn’t know Uncle had such morbid tastes in literature," he said, wonderingly. Then, looking up: "What’s that you’ve got?"

"More original manuscripts," I whispered almost reverently. "I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of that appalling young genius, Robert Blake? I thought not; well, he only died last year, after all ... but word is getting around about these stories." I stared at the neatly written manuscript pages of "Shaggai", "The Feaster from the Stars", "The Stairs in the Crypt", "The Burrower Beneath", and "In the Vale of Pnath.”

"Someday, they must be published, for all to read," I murmured, hungrily scanning the papers.

But Brian was examining the pile in bafflement, "If they’re so rare and valuable, why hide them away behind another row of books?" he asked, almost challengingly. "I always thought collectors liked to show off their treasures—why?"

I gave him look for look.

"I don't know," I said honestly.

WE drove to the diner for breakfast and bought some supplies for lunch, as the utilities were still turned on and it might be more pleasant to cook something than go out through the rain again. We spent the rest of the morning cataloguing the furniture and pictures; I don’t know much about antiques, but everything looked pretty valuable to me. With a little luck, we would each come away from this with a sizable sum of money. The real estate value of Uncle Hiram’s house was another matter; the way the town was slouching into decay—and the nearness of the house to Hubble’s Field—might bring the resale value way down.

I was mulling over these things while going through my uncle’s curio collection, when I was roused by a startled whoop from Brian.

"What’s up?" I demanded, joining him in the library. "You just about gave me a heart attack ..."

Then my words trailed away. Brian was grinning at me excitedly, beside a door-size opening in the bookshelves. "A secret room!" he exclaimed, eyes a-gleam with boyish enthusiasm. "I was searching behind the shelves to see if there were any more concealed books, and must have triggered the mechanism. Like to’ve scared me out of a year's growth! Take a look ..."

I peered past his burly shoulders into a narrow, small, cramped, airless room, revealed to view when one of the bookcases had swung ajar like a door. It was so dark within the hidden chamber that, at first, all I could see was a huge piece of ancient oakwood furniture. It took me a few moments to identify it.

"My God! That’s an adumbry; looks authentic, too," I gasped. “What’s—”

"Sort of a Medieval bookcase. Monks in the old monasteries used them to lay flat books too huge to stand on edge." I said absently.

"Looks like they left a few behind, then." he remarked. For there were a number of immense volumes on the low, flat shelving—books bound in vellum, wrinkled and yellowed with age, or in flaking black leather. I pulled one down, screwing up my face at the reek of ancient mildew and decay which arose from it like a palpable touch.

The next instant a pang of fearful surmise stabbed through me. I held in my hands an Elizabethan folio of fabulous age, a bound manuscript written in a crabbed hand on thick sheets of excellent parchment. And the title page bore this inscription: Al Aziph, ye Booke of ye Arab, Call'd ye Necronomicon of Abdoul Al-hazred, Newly Englished by Me, Master Jno. Dee, of Mortlake, Doctor of ye Arts.

Even Brian could not help but be impressed by the discovery, doubtless remembering that I had called the Neironomicon "one of the rarest books in the world," which indeed it was. It was worth, I suppose, thousands ... even more, if it truly was what it seemed to be. That is, I am no expert in Elizabethan or Jacobean handwriting, but the huge folio pages looked old enough to have been in Dr. Dee’s own hand. Could this be the original manuscript?

“Here's another one,” Brian muttered thoughtfully. "Livre d'lvon ...”

"... The Book of Eibon," I said dazedly. I examined it; the ancient bound manuscript was tattered and in a disreputable condition, the pages water-stained and foxed with mildew. Still and all, the antiquated Norman French seemed legible enough ... and also, the calligraphy of the handwriting looked old enough to be in Gaspard du Nord's veritable hand ....

With repetition, I found, the shocks of discovery dimmish. The mind numbs, can bear no more. There were other books on the shelves, but we did not look at them. The light from the open door revealed cabalistic designs traced in chalk on the floor; curious and oddly obscene instruments of brass, copper, or steel glittered on the topmost shelf; the air was rank with mouldering decay, stale and vitiated. Quire suddenly, I felt sick to my stomach: Now I knew, or thought I knew, why Uncle Hiram had broken off relations with his family.

It was not his doing, it was theirs. The Winfields were of ancient stock; rumors and whispers of disgusting witch-cult survivals in our accursed corner of New England had come to them, with whispers of certain disturbing and unsettling doings in Arkham, Innsmouth, and Dunwich.

The Winfields had cast Uncle Hiram out because he was dabbling in rituals and lore too loathsome, too blasphemous, to be tolerated.

And I am a Winfield ....

No words passed between us, but we left the secret room together, as if in obedience to the same impulse. And we left the hidden door ajar.

VI.

WE did little more the rest of that cold, drizzly day; nor did we discuss what we had found. Brian was too healthy-minded, too boyishly wholesome and normal to have read the queer old texts and the tainted literature into which I have delved more deeply than I wish I had. But he sensed the evil that lurked all about us, in the pages of those abominable old books, and that gloated down from the smirking canine faces in that grisly painting, and that breathed about the dark old house from that charnel-pit of buried horrors men call Hubble's Field.

Later, feeling a bit hungry, and oddly desirous of some human companionship, we drove through the dank drizzle back to the diner by the waterfront. Before, it had been empty, save for a slatternly girl behind the counter and a fat cook chewing on the stub of a dead cigar, bent over the steam-table. Now, though, it was half-full, and I thought the locals looked at us oddly as we went in and took a table by the blurred and greasy window. They were a disreputable lot, men with stubbled cheeks and furtive eyes, clad in filthy overalls and flannel shirts. We paid them no attention, but it seemed to me that we were a larger object of curiosity, or resentment, than we should have been, even taking into consideration the attention a "city stranger" draws in secluded, decaying backwaters like Dumham Beach.

The gum-chewing waitress leaned over the counter and said something to one of the locals. I couldn’t make out her whining tones, something about “of Stokely place” and “Hubble's Field", but he grumbled something in reply that sounded like "Damned lotta nerve, cornin' in here."

"... Git back where they came from," muttered another. A third gave a surly nod of agreement.

"Now it’s gonna start all over again, I bet!" he growled.

More disapproving, even menacing, looks were directed at us. Brian noticed it, too. “We seem to be distinctly unpopular, Win,” he observed. I nodded quickly.

"We do, indeed. Let’s finish up and get out of here before there’s trouble."

"Good idea," he agreed. We left and drove back through the wet, saying little, each busy with his own thoughts.

That evening Brian was browsing through one of the old books while I tried to concentrate on cataloguing the contents of the house. My mind seemed unable to focus on business, being obscurely troubled.

"Here’s something odd. Win," Brian spoke up. Something in his tones made me look up sharply.

"What’s that you're reading?"

"The Necronomicon ... listen to this! Hm, let's see—here it is: '... and the Mi-Go that are the minions of His Half-Brother, Lord Hastur, come down but rarely to the ...', no, a little further on: '... and likewise is it with the fearsome Yuggs that are the servitors of Zoth-Ommog and His Brother, Ythogtha, and that are led in That Service by Ubb, Father of Worms, they slither but seldom from their moist and fetid burrows beneath the fields where they make their loathsome lair'—wasn’t that Ponape figurine you people were so concerned about supposed to be an image of Zoth-Ommog?"

I felt a queer foreboding. "It was. Is there any more?"

"Plenty, listen co this: 'But all such as these, aye, and the Night-Gaunts, too, that be in the service of Nyarlathotep under their leader, Yegg-ha the Faceless Thing, and the Dholes of Yaddith, and the Nug-Soth, that serve the Mighty Mother'—I’ll skip down the page—'they fret and fumble ever at the fetters of the Elder Sign, the which doth bind their Masters, and they strive ever to do That which should set Them free, even unto the Red Offering. And in this dreadful Cause they have full many times ere this seduced and bought the hearts and souls of mortal men, selecting such as be frail and vain, venal or avaricious, and thereby easily corrupted by the thirst for knowledge, or the lust for gold, or the madness for power that is man's deepest and most direful sin ....' "

We stared at each other for a moment. Then I got up and crossed to where my cousin was sitting, and examined the page over his shoulder.

I read: “Such men as these, I say, they whisper to of nights, and lure into their toils with Promises most often unfulfilled. For men they need, and that hungrily: for 'tis the hand of mortal men alone can dislodge the Elder Sign and undo the mighty ensorcellments stamped upon the prisons of the Old Ones by the Elder Gods—"

“Look at the next passage,” he said in low, troubled tones.

I read on: “In particular it be those of the minions that inhabit the noisome depths beneath the Earth's crust that lure men to their dreadful service through promise of wealth; for all the ore and riches of the world be theirs to dispense, aye, mines of gold and great heaps of inestimable gems. Of these, the Yuggs, whose name the Scribe rendereth as the Worms of the Earth, are by far the most to be feared, for it is said that there be many a rich and wealthy man bestriding the proud ways of the world today, the secret of whose wealth lies in accursed treasure brought to his feet by the immense and loathsome, the white and slimy Yuggs, whereby to purchase his service to their Cause, to the utter and most damnable betrayal of humankind, and the imperilment of the very Earth.”

Brian's face was drawn, his eyes haunted by a fearful surmise. “Remember, we wondered where Uncle Hiram’s fortune came from,” he whispered.

I flinched away from his stare. "What are you suggesting?" I cried protestingly. “That's absolutely crazy—madness!”

“Is it? Remember that queer term, the 'Red Offering' ... and all those bodies out in Hubble's Field ...?”

“What are you ... trying to say?” I scoffed, but my voice was shaky and I knew that Brian could read the doubt in my eyes.

"Hubble's Field." he murmured somberly, “Ubb, Father of Worms ... the Worms of the Earth ... 'those that inhabit the noisome depths beneath the Earth's crust that lure men to their service through promise of wealth' ... Hubble’s Field ... E-choe-lab, 'The Place of Worms' ...."

"...Ubb’s Field," I gasped. He nodded grimly.

“Come on,” said Brian briefly, springing up and heading for the secret chamber. I paused only long enough to snatch up my electric torch. Then I followed him into the Unknown ....

VII.

THE beam of my torch flashed about the plaster walls of the cramped, airless little room sending enormous shadows leaping crazily. Brian was running his hands over the walls as if searching for something. I asked him in a rather breathless voice what it was he was looking for. He shook his head numbly.

“Damned if I know,” he confessed. “Another secret panel, I guess, leading maybe to another hidden room beyond this one.”

At my suggestion we dragged the huge Medieval adumbry away from the wall. As the only piece of furniture in the hidden chamber, it might conceal another door, if door there was.

And there was ....

Brian’s searching fingers found and pressed a button set flush into the plaster. Some mechanism concealed behind the wall squealed rustily, protesting. A black opening appeared. I shone my light within the opening, and we saw crudely hewn stone steps going down into darkness.

"That's it!" Brian breached triumphantly.

“You're crazy,” I said. “Probably just leads to the basement.”

“This is Southern California,” he reminded me. “Houses don’t have cellars or basements like they do back east. Just hot water heaters out in back ... come on! And hold that light steady.”

Propping the sliding panel open with one of the brass implements from the top shelf of the adumbry, we started down the steps, Brian leading the way.

The stone stair wound down into the depths in a spiral; air blew up from below us, sickening with the stench of mold and rot and mildew, sweetish with the smells of raw wet soil. And over all the other stenches, strangely, the salt smell of the sea.

"My Cod! There! Look—"

Strewn on the lichen-crusted steps beneath us gems glimmered and flashed in the light of the torch. Some were cut into facets and set in antique gold or silver settings, others were raw and neither cut nor polished. Interspersed among the jewels were lumps of gold ore, and silver, and worked pieces of precious metals. There were many coins scattered down the steps: I bent, picked one up, examined it, peering with dread surmise at noble Spanish profiles of ancient kings.

"No wonder he was so rich, damn him!" breathed Brian, his eyes gleaming wildly in the electric glare of the torch. "No wonder they bought his ‘service’ so easily ... my God! "The Red Offerings!' "

"You still don't have any real proof," I protested. But my words rang hollowly, even to my hearing.

"There's all the proof I need." raged Brian, kicking with his shoe at the surface of the mold-crusted step. Gems and coins scattered, clattering. And it seemed to me that something stirred in the darkness beneath where we stood.

"Come on, let's follow this thing to the end of it." Without waiting for me to follow, he plunged recklessly down the coiling stair, rubies and sapphires crunching and squealing under his tread. While I lingered, hesitating just a little, he vanished from my sight.

Then I heard him cry out in a wrathful roar.

“There’s someone down here. Win! You, there, stop—”

A moment of dead silence. The stench became overpowering, sickening. Something huge and wet and glistening white surged in the gloom beneath where I stood hesitating.

Then Brian screamed ... a raw shriek of ultimate horror such as I have never heard before from human lips, and hope and pray never to hear again. A scream such as that could rip and tear the lining of a man’s throat—

Calling his name out, I plunged and stumbled and half-fell down the steps, slipping in the slimy muck that coated the stones.

I reached the bottom of the stair, but Brian was not there. There was nothing at all to be seen, no side passages, no doorways: nothing.

The coiling stone stair did not end, but it vanished into a black pool of slimy liquid mud which completely filled the bottom of the stairwell. Something died within me as I shone my light across the black pool. The agitated ripples that crawled from edge to edge of the pool, as if something heavy had just fallen in ....

Fallen, or been dragged.

I DID not stay very much longer in the huge old house so near, so fearfully near to Hubble's Field. Once the police had taken my wild and incoherent statement—which doubtless they dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic—I returned to Brian’s apartment in Santiago.

I brought with me the old books. It was—it is—my firm intention to give them to some suitable, scholarly collection; I shall most likely donate them to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities, which already has Copeland’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Zanthu Tablets. For some reason, I linger on here; and I do not think I shall go back to my place of employment at Miskatonic. After all, with the wealth of my heritance from Uncle Hiram's estate, I need no longer work for a living and may indulge my whims.

Every night, as I hover on the brink of sleep, the Voices come—whispering, whispering. Wealth and power and forbidden knowledge they promise me, over and over ... now that I have already performed the Red Offering, I may enjoy the fruits of my—sacrifice.

In vain I protest that it was not I that flung or felled or drove Brian down into that horrible pool of black, liquescent mud at the bottom of the secret stair. The stair of which I said nothing to the police.

But the Voices say it does not matter: The Red Offering has been made. And it must be made again, and again, and again.

Is that what the loutish workman in the diner meant when he predicted, "Now it's gonna start all over again?" Perhaps. From the hundreds of corpses the authorities found buried in Hubble’s Field, it has been going on for a very long time already.

Oh, they know too well how easy it is to seduce weak and fallible men, curse them!

The Voices whisper to me how easy it is to make the Sign of Koth, which will take me beyond the Dream-Gates where the Night-Gaunts and the Ghouls, and the Ghusts of Zin, wait to welcome me; from thence the great winged Byakhee that serve Hastur in the dark spaces between the stars linger upon my coming, to fly me to the dark star amidst the Hyades, to Carcosa beside the cloudy shores of Lake Hali, to the very foot of the Elder Throne where the King in Yellow—even He, Yhtill the Timeless One—will receive my Vow, and where I will receive the penultimate guerdon of my service, and will at length glimpse That which is hidden behind the Pallid Mask ... soon ... soon ....

I have been reading the Necronomicon a lot, these empty days, waiting for the nights to come and the Voices to begin.

I think I will move back to Uncle Hiram's house in Durnham Beach soon. After all, it belongs to me, now.

It, too, is part of the Winfield heritance.