The Xothic Legend Cycle

I am New England born, and home to me

Is ancient Kingsport on the Harbour side.

When I was very young my Father died

And so I came to Arkham by the sea

Where Uncle Zorad and his servant, Jones,

Lived in the old house. He, my guardian,

Was a strange, silent, melancholy man

Given to dark old books and carven stones.

It was from him at last I understood

Why Kingsport people shunned our family.

“Our grandsires came in 1693,"

He said. "And even here they hate our blood.

We came from the old country co survive.

There, we were witches, to be burnt alive."

How much I loved the city's ancient ways.

Quaint cobbled streets, fanlights above the door;

Arkham preserved a softer, gentler lore

In this day’s turmoil, from lost nobler days.

I loved the crooked alleys, narrow, grey,

And gabled houses leaning all awry ...

But even then it had begun to die;

The very air was noisome with decay.

The river-mist, rank with a rotten smell,

The crowded houses, slumped, ramshackle, thin;

Arkham was like a corpse whose outward shell

Preserved a lifelike semblance, while within

Worm, mould, and maggot, in a wriggling slime

Bear witness co the leprous touch of time.

It was that month when red Aldebaran

Burned in the solstice skies arisen late.

With cryptic starry signs enconstellate,

Spelling some occult lore unguessed by man.

The shifting starlight made strange shadows flit

Among the sliding coils of mist that flowed

From the dark Miskatonic past the road.

And every night the Dagon Hall was lit.

It was a sort of church. Old malformed oaks

Grew up around it in a kind of ring.

I overheard the servant say, "The folks

Wonder, ye keep the lad from Worshipping;

Tonight is Festival." I bent to hear

My Uncle say, "He’s young. Another year ..."

Northwards from Arkham up along the coast,

The ancient woods that climb the hills around

Grow oddly thick for such unhealthy ground.

And on the hill-tops, where they grow the most,

All seem deformed and strangely overgrown

As if their roots, deep down within the earth,

Fed on the rank putrescence of some Birth

Malformed and monstrous, and best left unknown.

Even the grass grows mouldy, and a smell

Hangs in the air as though something was dead.

While bloated fungi spread their stench as well.

I asked my Uncle’s servant once. He said,

"Sure, I can tell ye"—would he had nor talked!

"—That is the Wood where once the Black Goat

walked."

He always kept it locked, the attic room,

And ordered me to keep away from there.

I wondered why, and one day climbed the stair

And broke the lock. A place of airless gloom

With walk and rafters that leaned oddly wrong

And crazy angles that were hard to see,

As in some alien geometry

With more dimensions than to ours belong.

But nothing frightened me, until I tried

To open up the window for some air

And found it opened from the other side,

I wiped the dusty pane, and saw out there—

What should not be! I screamed, and somehow knew

What awful worlds chat window opened to.

"It’s been abandoned quite a spell" he said,

"That old church on the hill in back o' Hunt's,

When we was kids, we thought 'twas haunted. Once

I found out why its still untenanted ....

One night I heard 'em talk about the place,

How it were closed on 'count of what were done

In there each Roodmass, and how there was one

Never come out, who went inside. They chased

The preacher feller our o' town, I think

One night the kids dared me to go inside.

It were all dark and dusty, with a stink

All through th' air, like somethin' that had died.

—I screamed and run, soon as I understood

Whose image there on the Black Altar stood!”

The night he died the Demon Star was high.

It hung above the house against the dark

A cold, arcane, malign and watching spark

Like some green, burning and Cycloptic eye.

They locked me in my room, but I could see

My Uncle take down that abhorrent book

At whose mad page I was forbade to look,

Gorscadt's grim volume of Necrolatry.

I heard them chanting (they had closed the blind),

And smelled some burning reek ophidian ...

Then all was silence ... till the screams began.

At dawn the neighbors broke the door, to find

Jones gibbering and mad, Uncle was dead.

They found his body. All except the head.

When I was young they never let me look

Into that room kept under lock and key,

But when he died my Uncle left to me

His strange collection. Almost every book

Was old and crumbling, curiously bound

In serpent-skin, and with a rotten smell

As of some tainted and abandoned well,

Or some dead thing long buried underground.

I looked in one. And, though my blood ran cold,

I read it, page by page. The nightwind blew

About the eaves, and when red morning rolled

Up from the east, I finished. And I knew

Those old, old books were not meant to be read

By sane men. They were better burnt instead.

The yellowed pages, rotten with decay.

Crawling with loathsome symbols, fill my brain

With wild, tumultuous visions. Were I sane

I'd rise and hurl the leprous books away,

Yet I read on, half thrilled, half in disgust,

Rapt with sick fascination to explore

The vile corruption of forbidden lore,

That leaves me weak and soiled with nameless lust.

I rise with dawn and scrub my shaking hands

And gulp strong brandy down, and try to pray,

And vow to burn these books ... another day ....

But I am like one trapped in sinking sands,

Who strayed apart far from the paths of men.

The night will come. And I will read again ...

This lore was old before the rise of Ur,

Before the pomp of Babylon was born,

Ere golden Egypt knew her golden morn.

Or Tyre, or Nineveh, or dark Sumer.

Ere any human peoples trod the earth

The blue Pacific lapped the carven walls

Of seacoast cities whose basaltic halls

Were drowned in myth before Atlantis' birth.

Lost land, thy ancient mages read the stars

And scanned necrotic hieroglyphs on scrolls

Borne hence from flighted Yuggoth where she rolls

Far on the Rim amidst fantastic wars.

Only the Text bears witness to thy lore,

Sunken R'lyeh, that shall rise no more.

Long-lost and legended, R'lyeh sleeps,

Dreaming ensorcelled ages by, the while

Slow foetid waves wash round her rotting pile

Drowned in the utter most of ocean deeps ...

Until the stars are right, when from that tomb

The awful Dead her primal ruins hide

Shall rise tremendous, as was prophesied.

Until that hour she sleeping bides her doom,

Wake not, dread ruin that the tides caress.

Thou weed-grown mass of thronged decaying spires.

Dim, phosphor-litten with putrescent fires—

Sleep on, thou whelmed, accurst necropolis!

Too soon shall from thy cyclopean fane

Cthulhu wake to walk the earth again!

In what remote Hyperborean clime,

Under what alien-configured skies

Namelessly constellated, it doth rise

Is known to none. In the abyss of time

No eye hath seen the sable mountain rear

Her pinnacles. The place hath not been guessed

Where Kadath lifts her onyx-castled crest

Among the shantak-guarded deserts drear.

Only chose dreamers roaming far afield

Beyond the lands we know, to them alone

Is far and fabulous Kadath revealed

And all her mysteries to them made known,

And That which lies deep in her inmost crypt—

The secret of the Pnakotic Manuscript.

In glacier-whelmed and lost Commoriom,

Aeons before Atlantis, at the Pole

Where now but black and frozen oceans roll

Their sluggish tides, and warm suns never come,

He sought the secrets of the Elder Age,

Of nightmare gods and old fantastic wars

Brought down by Tsathoggua from the stars

And chronicled on Eibon's darkling page.

Hyperborea spake his name with dread

And whispered of strange shapes and stranger light

That moved about his ebon spire one night

When thunder spoke and all the stars burned red.

Next morn it lay in ruins everywhere.

They found his Book. His body was not there ....

Beneath Voormithadreth the Mount of Dread

In lost Hyperborea long ago

Before the coming of eternal snow.

The wizard followed where the shantak led;

Down through the gulfs of those tremendous deeps,

Caverns of nightmare, where the wholesome sun

Hath never shone since first the earth begun,

To that abyss where Tsathoggua sleeps.

Eibon alone hath seen, and come back sane

From that slime pit of madness where It lies,

The Black Abomination from the skies,

Who sleepeth now but who shall wake again.

We know the truth, we who have dared to look

Into the darkling pages of his Book ....

In dreams alone I tread those jungled streets

Where shattered columns, black with hoary age.

Hint of the splendour of some crumbling page

Of history now legended. The seats

Of prehistoric majesty still stand—

The monstrous walls, the cryptic minarets

—But whose the hand that raised them? Time forgets,

Mazed in the darkness of this silent land.

Only the moon remembers, ages gone,

The glittering, barbaric Wizard-Kings

Who found the Sign and made the Offerings

In the forgotten ages of earth's dawn.

The moon alone recalls that nameless crime

That wiped them from the memory of Time.

Something is wrong tonight. Far out to sea

Strange phosphorescence flickers from below.

The ocean heaves in waves uneasy, slow,

That roil and bubble, an old prophecy

Comes back to haunt my soul ... the stars burn cold,

In patterns oddly wrong. And now the deep

Surges, like something—stirring—in its sleep!

Is this the Night the ancient books foretold?

Iä! The seas unfold! That Shape—’tis true!

He rises from the city old as time! ...

I woke ... and knew it but a dream ... yet knew

The blood-congealing truth of that old rhyme:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die."

"This is the night," the sly-faced stranger leered

—He had approached me on the lonely streets—

"This is the night the Arkham coven meets!"

Before I answered he had disappeared.

At nightfall I went down the cellar steps

And through that secret door which I had found.

It led by dark ways tunneled underground

Into a caverned abyss in the depths.

Weak with a mingled loathing and desire,

I joined the hooded throng that milled and whirled

About the standing stones, red-lit with fire

That flamed up from the bowels of the world.

One hailed me—"Azath!"—he was robed in red—

''That was your Uncle's coven-name," he said.

The Coven-Master gave to me a phial

Of that dread opiate that is the key

To dream-gates opening upon a sea

Of achetontic vapours: mile on mile

Stretched ebon coasts untrod, wherefrom aspire

Pylons of rough-hewn stone climbing to skies

Alien-constellated, where arise

Grey mottled moons of cold and leprous fire.

My dream-self roamed the cosmic gulfs profound.

Past daemon-haunted Haddith, where in deeps

Of foul putrescence buried underground

The loathsome shoggoth hideously sleeps.

I saw—and screamed! And knew my doom of dooms,

Learning at last ... where the Black Lotus blooms.

I drank the golden mead and did those things

Of which I read within the ancient book.

The wind awoke. The elms and willows shook

Before the thunder of fantastic wings.

Down from the cosmic gulfs the monster fell,

The grim, stupendous, bat-winged Byakhee,

Come from the cloudy shores of Lake Hali,

Black-furred and iron-beaked, with eyes of Hell.

When I bestrode its back, the beast unfurled

Its vast and mighty wings. Across dark seas

Of space we flew. Amid the Hyades

We reached at last that bleak and mythic world

To men forbidden and by gods abhorred,

Carcosa, where the great Hastur is Lord.

It was a scene that I had known before,

This barren, desolate, and drear expanse

Through which I wandered in a dream-like trance.

And there in somber splendor by the shore

Of dark Hali the nameless city stood:

Black domes and monolithic towers loom

Stark and gigantic in the midnight gloom

Like druid menhirs in a haunted wood.

These streets and walls I seem to half-recall,

Wandering blindly through the winding ways

Beneath a sky with strange black stars ablaze.

From some mad dream ... or was it dream at all?

Aye, here it was I heard Cassilda sing.

Where flap the yellow tatters of The King!

Down the dark street of monoliths I passed.

The shambling, faceless figure of my Guide

A voiceless thing that beckoned at my side.

And to the dreaded Gate I came at last.

Before the silent Guardian I made

The black unhallowed Sacrifice, and spoke

Names at whose sound forgotten echoes woke.

The portals gaped. I entered unafraid.

Fate, or my stars, or some accursed pride

Had brought me here. Naked, I stood alone

And took the Vow before the Elder Throne—

He laughed, and drew His tattered mantle wide—

O do not seek to learn nor ever ask

What horror hides behind ... The Pallid Mask!

In dreams the Daemon comes upon the hour

Of full moon over Arkham. And I see

The opal shores of seas unknown to me

Where Babel-tall, bizarre, the cities tower—

Black and basalt metropoli of myth

Athrong with ziggurat and pyramid

That scale dark skies where ebon moons are hid.

Is it a dream of Yaddath or of Ith?

Or some outré and undimensioned sphere

Beyond the cosmos? I seek not to learn

Upon what occult world those ruins rear.

Remembering those books I ought to burn.

This much I know: the cities and the shore

Were somewhere, somehow, known to me before ....

There lies a world beyond the seas of night.

Past the last planet, on the farthest Rim

Of curving space, where by some cosmic whim

It reels and wheels beyond the shores of light,

Lost in the howling dark. The eye of man

Can never glimpse its lone imperial place,

Deep in the blackest depths of elder space,

Nor astronomic glass may ever scan.

This is the planet that Alhazred knew,

Beyond the measured, known, and numbered nine;

Lost and alone where never sun doth shine.

Nor soft winds blow, nor skies are ever blue.

Far in the midnight deeps beyond our sight,

There the black planet rides the tides of night.

Dreams hold no dread for me, for I alone

Went down the Seven Hundred Steps and passed

The Gate of Deeper Slumber, till at last

I went beyond the limits of the Known ...

I have seen many-columned Y’ha-nthlei,

And talked with serpent-boarded Byatis,

And, flown on Night Gaunts to the last abyss,

Have glimpsed the foetid pits where Abhoth lay.

All worlds lie open to me ... time and space

Reveal their darkest secrets to the one

Who dares the nighted realm of They Who Shun

The Light, and comes to gaze into His face.

What I have seen would drive you mad; yet I

Cannot go mad; I cannot even ... die.

Where ominous the mould-encumbered walls

Of riven citadels old as Mnar

Rise in their ruin, from a distant star

I wandered; now, nightmare alone recalls

Those greenly-litten vales of writhing trees

Whose scaled and snaky limbs reached for my flesh;

And those black, hellish jungles beyond Kesh

Where I with ghouls conversed by foetid seas.

And there was one that shambled from the feast,

Whining with eagerness to scan my face,

A filth-encrusted, gaunt, hound-muzzled beast

Who sought to fold me in its vile embrace.

It spake those words at which I paled and fled.

"I was your Uncle, when I lived," it said.

They ride the night-wind when the Demon Star

Over the dim horizon burns bale-red.

Come from the charnel-pits of the undead,

Nadir of nightmare, where the shoggoths are.

Now, till the light of morning-litten east

Bids them return to the unbottomed slime,

Freely they roam the darkling earth a time

And from fresh grave abominably feast.

These are they spawn that nighted pits confine,

And shouldst thou sight them in the midnight gloom,

Then art thou lost! For not the Elder Sign

That seals the great Cthulhu in his tomb.

Canst save thee from the hunger-maddened wrath

Of the Begotten of Shub-Niggurath

I have seen Yith, and Yuggoth on the Rim.

And black Carcosa in the Hyades;

And in the slimy depths of certain seas,

I have beheld the tomb where lieth Him

Who Was And Who Shall Be; and I have flown

Astride the shantak or the byakbee

Where Kadath in the Cold Waste terribly

Bears up her onyx-castled crest unknown.

I have conversed with seer and archimage

In glacier-buried, drear Commoriom,

And traced the maggot-eaten parchment page

Of tomes that Tsarhoggua carried from

Dim vast Cykranosh. I am no more sane,

For too much horror burns away the brain.

Sometimes I dream that I was once a man

On some small planet in the deeps of night,

And not a mindless, mewling parasite.

And, with my brethren off Aldebaran

Or green Algol, I sometimes seem to trace

Against the dark a smiling, lovely thing ....

I half-recall a voice that used to sing

Old lullabies ... is it my mother's face?

Is it a vision, dream, or memory?

The chittering horde about me sweeps me on:

The half-remembered vision dims—is gone.

An ancient pain gnaws at the heart of me.

From this strange dream, this mystic cryptogram,

I wake to horror—knowing what I am.

From black Mnar, from Yuggoth on the Rim,

From those liquescent pits where shoggoths bloat,

Across the cosmic gulfs of spheres remote

—We come! We come! At the command of Him

Who is our Lord and Father. Bleak Kadath

And frozen Leng have known our awful tread;

Lost Yhe in the Pacific quailed in dread

Before our coming, and our Father’s wrath ....

And some of us were human once, and some

Have never even heard the name of Earth,

Abominations of a monstrous birth

Out of the womb of nightmare. ... When we come,

The nations kneel in fear before our step ...

We are the Children of Nyarlathotep.