The Xothic Legend Cycle

The Strange Doom of Enos Harker by Lin Carter and Robert M. Price

IN 1931 I graduated, with modest honors, from Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and for some months thereafter sought gainful employment without success. It was my intention to continue my studies and seek a degree upon the completion of my thesis, which was concerned with obscure cult survivals in certain parts of the East. Very much research remained undone, however, and employment in those Depression years was scarce and seldom remunerative; since I required part-time employment, my search was futile.

At length, however, I noticed an item in the personal columns of the Arkham Advertiser, placed therein by Dr. Enos Harker. He offered a comfortable subsistence and free room and board in his home for a private secretary able to organize his notes and prepare a manuscript for publication. The opportunity seemed nothing less than a godsend, and I applied forthwith.

Dr. Harker had rented a seaside house, barely more than a cottage, on Cairn’s Point. Once a fashionable oceanfront resort for the wealthy merchants and older families of the seaport town, the neighborhood was largely deserted by now, and even rather desolate. But the streetcar connected the suburb with the downtown area, and it was not difficult to find my way.

My potential employer was an unusual figure of a man in his late sixties, I assumed. Inclined to corpulence, he affected a severe clerical suit of drab black, and even a clerical collar. I soon discovered that he was, or had been (I never quite learned which), a preacher in one of the more obscure of the Pentecostal sects—a missionary, in fact, who had spent many years in India and parts of Burma and Tibet. Portions of his face and hands were curiously swathed in surgical bandages, and he informed me at our first meeting that he suffered from a skin condition similar to scrofula or eczema, for which a local physician was treating him. It was this disability that necessitated the hiring of someone to handle the paperwork, for I gathered that it was his hands which were most seriously affected by the disease.

“Blaine, Blaine,” he murmured, with a slight, thoughtful frown. “I wonder if you are by any chance a relative of Dr. H. Stephenson Blaine of the Sanbourne Institute for Pacific Antiquities, in Santiago, California?"

"I have that honor." I acknowledged, "for he is my uncle."

"Excellent, excellent!" Dr. Harker made reply, in that oddly hushed, almost whispering voice of his, which made me wonder, a bit squeamishly, if his peculiar affliction had not somehow affected his vocal cords as well as his face and hands. "I have read a monograph or two of his. A scholar of some reputation. I believe."

Our conversation soon terminated. Dr. Harker seemed to be satisfied with my credentials and I was, as I have already stated, happy with the terms of his employment. I was to begin my work the following Monday. We parted and I returned to my small flat on Parker Street in a mood of considerable elation.

Over the following weekend, it occurred to me that perhaps it would be wise to look up my employer in the various reference works available in the library at Miskatonic, which I did. He had been a graduate of the Byram Theological Seminary in Kingsport, had traveled and lectured widely, and, as I have already remarked, had spent many years as a missionary in the East. An amateur anthropologist of some note, he had published a number of papers on certain aspects of Asian archaeology and upon certain of the cults of the Far East, which interested me greatly, as my own interests, of course, lay much in that area of study.

Apparently an explorer of some repute, he had penetrated into portions of inner Asia seen by few white men, and had been one of the first to explore the ruined stone city of Alaozar in the Sung region of Burma. He had also traveled extensively, it would seem, in the more northerly parts of Tibet.

All of these things made me certain that we should enjoy a mutually profitable and interesting relationship.

Why, then, did I feel an uneasy qualm that warned me to shun this unusual personage?

A qualm almost to be named as ... fear?

MY tasks were simple enough, and did nor require extensive labor.

Until his progressive disability had robbed my employer of the fullest use of his hands, he had been compiling notes toward a scholarly work of great length and complexity. It became my primary duty to organize these items of information into some sort of order, to take down by dictation further data as he gave it in his soft, weak voice, and also to journey to the library of Miskatonic University and the Kester Library in nearby Salem for further research.

Many of the books I delved into for this purpose were tomes I had already consulted in the course of preparing my own thesis. I refer to certain volumes such as the Unaussprechlichen Kulten by the German occultist von Junzt, the Comte d'Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, von Heller’s Black Cults, the original German text of the Unter-Zee Kulten, and the heavily expurgated treatise, Le Culte des Morts. I had also to look into the abhorrent pages of the old of Alhazred for certain references to a singular corpse-eating cult in a place called Leng.

This particular volume is as notorious as it is rare, and its rarity is nigh fabulous. Generally kept under lock and key, my connections among the faculty of the university gave me free access to the damnable volume, although some of the ravings I glimpsed within its thickly written pages were to haunt my dreams thereafter.

In general, my employer was seeking references to a cult or tribe called the “Tcho-Tcho people”, rumored to linger on in certain of the more inaccessible parts of jungled Burma and in Leng—wherever Leng was supposed to be, for I could not find it in any atlas. They were believed to worship gods or devils with names like ”Zhar” and “Lloigor", but so little about them was known for certain that many authorities seemed to consider them to be merely legendary.

I was also to search for any and every reference to Leng itself; to a certain Tcho-Tcho lama who veiled his visage behind a mask of yellow silk and dwelt in a "prehistoric" stone monastery; to Inquanok, which seemed to be both a people and a place, the place being adjacent to the plateau of Leng; and to certain sea divinities or maritime demons with uncouth, unpronounceable names like “Cthulhu”, “Idh-yaa”, “Zoth-Ommog”, “Yeb”, "Ghatanothoa", "Ubb, Father of Worms", “Ythogtha”, and so on.

None of this research was particularly demanding of my time, but it was oddly disturbing. This was not only because my own researches had led me to many of these same sources, but because of certain events in the recent past which were still whispered of by the townspeople, but which had been hurriedly hushed up in the newspapers—the effect being that no one quite knew whether they were wild fables or contained a germ of horrible truth.

What really happened in the old Tuttle house on Aylesbury Road near the Innsmouth Turnpike, and why was the account published in the local papers so oddly cursory? For what reason did federal agents dynamite and burn several blocks of decaying waterfront tenements in nearby Innsmouth back in the winter of 1927-1928, and why did a U.S. naval submarine discharge torpedoes into the underwater chasm off Devil's Reef? And what really happened to poor Bryant Hoskins in that cabin in the woods to the north of Arkham, that led to his death as a raving madman in the County Sanitarium in March 1929?

Nobody really knew; or, if they knew, they didn't speak of it.

And why was Enos Harker so interested in this obscure, damnably ancient mythology?

SOME of the information I extracted from the old, crumbling books excited my employer to a pitch of feverish intensity. For example, I returned from one such trip to the library at Miskatonic with two quotations which seemed to me to be little more than innocuous, but which kept him up all night, pawing through his sheaves of notations with those bandaged hands of his, muttering under his breath, the visible portions of his features flushed with unhealthy and febrile exultation. For the sake of me, I could not guess why!

The first passage from the Necronomicon read thusly:

It was from fabled Sarkomand the Tcho-Tcho people first came into the Waking World, that time-forgotten city whose ruins bleached for a million years before the first true human saw the light of day; and its twin titan lions guard eternally the steps that lead from the Dreamland into the Great Abyss, whereover Nodens reigns as Lord, and the Night Gaunts that serve Him, under dread Yegg-ha, their master.

The second was a fragmentary ritual, apparently quoted from another source, which went thusly:

Aye, was it not written of old in R'lyeh that the Deep Ones await their followers, and we must not fail to be present at the Great Awakening? It is written that all shall arise and join with them, we who carry the Emblem and those who have merely looked upon it. From the ends of the earth cometh the Summons and the Call, and we dare nor delay. For in watery R'lyeh Great Cthulhu is stirring. Shub-Niggurath! Yog-Sothoth! Iä! The Goat with a Thousand Young! Are we nor all Her children?

When I delivered these notes to Enos Harker he virtually snatched them from my hand, holding the pages close to his face (for his eyesight had recently grown weakened, perhaps due to the progressive degeneration caused by his disease) and scanned them with fierce intensity.

"Of course!" he mumbled in that weak voice of his. "From Sarkomand they came ... all the way to the Sung plateau, to build their ghastly scone city in the jungles! I should have guessed it from—" but here his voice broke off and he glared at me with wary suspicion, almost as if he thought me spying upon some private thing. Then he went into the screened front room, which faced the beach, to scan the notes in private.

When I retired, a little past midnight, his light was still burning.

IT had by now become quite obvious to me that my employer’s health was failing very rapidly, although I still did not understand the nature of his complaint. I knew that a local physician, a Dr. Sprague, had been treating his scrofula—or whatever it was—with zinc ointment and with a substance called cortisone, then generally unavailable, as it was still in the experimental stage of being tested and had not yet been released to the general market.

None of the medications seemed to halt the spread of the skin condition. In addition, his features became bloated and puffy, and his person, which had been normally corpulent when I had first begun working with him, soon became grossly obese, he had difficulty in walking at times, and gradually the white bandages spread over his swollen, pasty visage until he was virtually masked with bandages, like an Egyptian mummy. There was also a peculiar smell about him that was singularly repulsive ... a nauseating stench, as of sea-water gone foul and rancid, or like the bloated, rotting corpse of some marine creature exposed to the harsh air and the cruel sun.

But perhaps I exaggerate. The cottage stood so close to the empty, deserted beach that the salt wind penetrated every part of it, and the reek of the stagnant seawater in the tidal pools and among the gaunt rocks filled my nostrils night and day.

Harker became increasingly dependent upon me for many of the small necessities of everyday life. It was no trouble for me to ride my bicycle into the edge of town and buy groceries, nor to wash the dishes and remove the garbage and handle his bills as already I was handling his correspondence.

This correspondence ranged all over the world, for Enos Harker was continually in touch with certain scholars in places like France, Peru, India, and even China, who had made a special study of the weird old mythology that had become his life's work. This mythology, by the way, had as its Central belief the notion that the earth had been visited by strange and demonic intelligences from other worlds and galaxies, and even from beyond the universe itself, from the very remotest of ages, long before the evolution of humankind. Not being made of matter as we know it, these "Ancient Ones" or "Old Ones", as they were known, were deathless and unaging.

Aeons before man, they were pursued to this part of space and time by their former masters, a race known only as the "Elder Gods." A titanic conflict ensued, and at its terminus, the Elder Gods were victorious over the rebels who had been their former servants. Unable co destroy the Old Ones, they imprisoned them with powerful spells—and, in particular, with a potent talisman called the "Elder Sign"—and in their charmed imprisonment they, presumably rage and roar to this latter day, for all the world like Fenris the wolf and the Midgard serpent in the Norse legends.

They are served, even in their imprisonment, however, by their minions or subject races, few of which are to be considered even remotely human. The devils which mostly concerned Enos Harker were the sea entities, Cthulhu and Ythogtha and the rest; their minions are called the Deep Ones and the ancient books of this system of superstition describe them shudderingly as huge and bloated things, half frog-like, half fish-like, partly squamous and partly rugose, with ghastly protuberant eyes, and gills.

The Tcho-Tcho people, also among his prime interests, are followers of another group of divinities, not sea elementals at all. They are associated with the "shunned and evil" plateau of Leng, which some texts discuss as though located in "the black heart of Secret Asia", and elsewhere mentioned as near the South Pole. This doubtless makes as little sense to the reader of this statement as it did to me at the time.

But there was an uncanny coherence to all of this. On the surface it seemed a mad, chaotic jumble of nightmarish legend, but underneath it all was a basis of something sinister, age-old and time-forgot but hideously suggestive.

For who would expect myths centuries, even millennia, old to concern themselves with intelligent creatures from other planers, distant stars, remote galaxies, or weird dimensions beyond the three we know?

MOST of the correspondence concerned a particularly rare book called the R'lyeh Text, for which my employer was searching with a furious need that went far beyond mere scholarly or scientific curiosity, and approached the proportions of a fixation.

Copies of this curious old book, while rare, were not unknown; indeed, several redactions (for the book had never been printed and existed only in manuscript copies, furtively circulated between the members of obscure cults) were to be found right on the closed shelves of the library at Miskatonic. The problem was that, while the R'lyeh Text was written in the letters of the common alphabet, the language itself was no longer known or understood. It apparently consisted of rituals or invocations to the devilgods of this mythology, which were read or chanted aloud by their worshipers; hence they needed only to be able to pronounce the uncouth verses, but did not really need to understand what they meant.

Few scholars, if any, could read the “R’lyehian” language, and it was for one of those that Enos Harker was so desperately searching ....

I have previously alluded to the strange mystery surrounding the death of Bryant Hoskins, who died in a madhouse in 1929. While the case attracted considerable attention in the public press, the authorities seemed to have hushed the whole affair up, but it had taken place so very recently, that there were still people about who possessed information concerning what had really happened in that secluded cabin in the woods to the north of Arkham.

By purest chance, one day about six months after I began my employment as the secretary of Enos Harker, a clue to the mystery came to light. A muckraking journalist on one of the less reputable Boston papers began digging into the case and turned up a sensational story which most people, I suspect, dismissed out of hand as wild speculation.

One item of information emerged from the newspaper story which sent my employer into a frenzy of excitement. Young Hoskins had been employed at Miskatonic in the capacity of private secretary to the director of the library, Dr. Cyrus Llanfer. In July of 1928, the library had received, as part of the Tuttle bequest, not only a priceless copy of the R'lyeh Text, but a document in what was believed to be Amos Tuttle’s own hand called the R'lyehian Key. The very existence of the Key went unnoticed for some time, until Bryant Hoskins chanced upon it by accident. It had been bound at the end of another manuscript volume, something called the Celaeno Fragments.

It would seem that the late Amos Tuttle had been one of those few scholars on Earth who was still able to decipher the mysterious, ancient language in which the R'lyeh Text was written, for his R'lyehian Key was none other than a glossary of the ancient language, together with some speculations on verb forms and grammatical structure.

Hoskins, who had become fascinated by the mysterious text, spent the last months of his life translating it into English. The labor had broken his health, both in mind and body, but when he was taken away to die raving in the asylum, the manuscript of his version of the Text was salvaged from the cabin.

According to the reporter's account, the “Hoskins Translation” now reposed in the secret shelves of the Miskatonic University Library.

Thither I went, bright and early, the very next morning.

I WAS ushered into Dr. Llanfer's office and he greeted me amicably enough, for we had had dealings over the past few months, during which my employer had sought access to the Necronomicon and other books. While these abhorrent old volumes are strictly forbidden to the general public, they are accessible to qualified scholars. Moreover, I was by this time well acquainted with Dr. Llanfer, so I imagined I should encounter no difficulty in gaining access to the Hoskins translation. I was in for a surprise.

"Mr. Blaine," the white-haired archivist said to me with a troubled note in his weary voice, “come with me if you will.” He motioned me to follow him into the Special Collections room, then through a double-locked door. Proceeding across the carpeted floor to a metal set of shelves, he unlocked this, too, and displaced two or three metal strongboxes of various shapes and sizes (some of which could hardly contain books. I mentally remarked). He turned toward me with one of these metal Cases, unlocked it, and opened it as gingerly as if he were a lion tamer parting the jaws of a ferocious beast.

“Here it is. Not much to look at, is it? Just a set of scribbled notes on pad paper not a year old. No ancient artifact, though God knows we house enough of those. This is the translation you're looking for. I have no plausible pretext under which to bar you from reading it, though I half-wish I did! This text has meant madness and death to at least three men of my own acquaintance. And so far as I know, all they did was to read it. As for myself, I have not perused its contents, not even after young Mr. Hoskins made reading it so much easier. Do not misunderstand me. I have the love of learning, of recovering lost knowledge even as these men did. But unlike Amos and Paul Tuttle and Bryant Hoskins, I do not have a suicide urge. I hope that you do not have it, either.”

Taken aback by this monologue, I scarcely knew how to reply. "What of Dr. Harker? It is he who has sent me. I am only his emissary. If the book is nor available to him, it will be my duty to tell him so. This I will do without qualm. But you must realize that he will not rest until he has had a chance to consult that book. Especially since, as you say, you can hardly deny a qualified scholar access to the official holdings of the library."

"Yes, all that you say is quite true, Mr. Blaine. Quite true. Only promise me that you will play your role as disinterested stenographer well. Read and transcribe what you must. But hold it within you only as long as it may rake you to get back to Harker's home and tell him. I fear he has already progressed too far down his path to be helped. And it would be cruel to prolong his agony. May the forbidden knowledge of the text of R’lyeh deliver the inevitable blow swiftly and mercifully. Here. Take what you need."

I proceeded to avail myself of Dr. Llanfer's oddly grudging generosity, intimidated by now at the prospect of whatever shocking revelations I should meet with. What could a mere text, however ancient and recondite, contain? I opened my notebook and commenced jotting down the greater part of the translation, feeling more and more a sense of anticlimax the further I went. At long last, after a couple of hours, I finished my task with something akin to a sense of disappointment, almost as if I had failed to find something I had sought within the text. Of course, I had no idea what it was my employer might be looking for. I knew not whether he should recognize whatever he sought in these strange litanies. nor whether disappointment might not be hotter than satisfaction, given Dr. Llanfer's manifest opinion of the ancient screed.

When I returned to Dr. Harker's manse that evening, it was plain he had been waiting with intense agitation, for he fairly grabbed the notebook from me and, without a word, turned and closed the door of his study. I was half-minded to linger just outside and listen for any demonstrative reaction within, but I rebuked myself for such juvenile scheming and retired for the night.

My curiosity had by now reached a zenith, its fires only banked by the silence in which the old clergyman shrouded the whole business. He only grew less and less communicative as his baffling condition worsened, seeking to make himself understood chiefly by monotone mutterings and waves of his bandage-mittened hands. Yet even such charades as these made it evident to me that somehow we were running a race against time. Was it a race to attain some goal, still unknown to me? Or was the race to escape some-frightful doom worse even than the physical debilitation that seemed rapidly and steadily to be consuming him? Strictly speaking, it was no business of mine. Certainly Dr. Harker never sought to share his burden with me.

I had more than an inkling that the reticent Dr. Sprague knew more than he dared say. He approached his ministrations with what appeared to me a hint of fear, though mixed with a greater dose of resignation, this made no sense to me at the time.

On one occasion I had exchanged pleasantries with the elderly physician as I made to leave the house and make another bicycle trip into Arkham to consult again the volumes in the university library. Upon learning my destination. Dr. Sprague offered to drive me into town on his way back. I felt some-revelation to be at hand, but as it happened I was disappointed. As he seemed to expect, I asked him about the precise nature of my employer's mysterious malady. Contrary to my own expectation, he had little to tell me.

"Beyond the physical symptoms which are as evident to you as they are to me, I can only say that what plagues Dr. Harker is something more in the nature of a spiritual affliction." He plainly wished nor to discuss the matter at greater length, but I had the very definite feeling that he had meant by his cryptic words to warn me of some danger. Could the old missionary’s pestilence be somehow contagious?

AS the days passed, I began to mark new symptoms plaguing Dr. Harker, chiefly an inability to sleep through the night. Though he denied it, it was clear that nightmares were displacing his nocturnal respite. Once I believed I heard him chanting one of the Psalms, as if to ward off his nightly nemesis: “He giveth to his beloved sleep ....”

Once his agitation passed over the line into actual screaming, and of such urgency as to awaken me, asleep as I was at the opposite end of the house. He himself remained asleep, and seemed to calm somewhat as I crept softly to his bedside, knowing that, despite my good intentions, such an invasion of his privacy might lead to my immediate dismissal. But I had to be sure the old man was all right. His breaching had slowed somewhat, but I noted that his nightmare flailings of a few moments previously had disarranged the gauzy wrappings of his face. The disturbance was but slight, and yet what I saw disturbed me profoundly. I have said that Dr. Harker had been quite plump on my first sight of him and had, with the progress of his disease, continued to bloat in a most unwholesome fashion. This I vaguely attributed to the side effects of some medicine he must he caking, since otherwise one would expect advancing degeneration to shrink and wither the body. Nothing I had seen prepared me for what I saw now.

His face, which he had lately taken to veiling almost completely, was partially visible, and it had suffered shocking disfigurement. His eyes were almost totally obscured by grotesquely swollen puffs of blue-veined pasty flesh. His nose, which admittedly I had never seen unswathed, seemed to have expanded to an astonishing degree. Here the change was not due to swelling—the very structure seemed to have been altered, the bridge oddly broadened, the nose itself, still covered at the top, absurdly elongated. His hair, always thin and wispy, was mostly gone, some of it visibly scattered around the pillow.

Though I felt utter repulsion, my curiosity was stronger still, and I actually found myself reaching hesitantly to pull away yet more of the loose bandaging. As I stood frozen with indecision, startlement shook me: The muffled voice spoke. "It appears I am found out. But I think you have discovered enough for one night." As he spoke, he made to rearrange his futile disguise, and he sat up.

“I am most sorry to have disturbed your sleep, my young friend. Return to your bed. I doubt that sleep will return with you, but try to get some rest. We will talk, and talk plainly, on the morrow. I would have taken you into my confidence ere now, save that I feared you might become drawn into the web that holds me fast.” With that, he turned his obese form over on its side, shaking the bed frame as he did.

There was nothing more to be said for the moment, so I turned and found my bed again. I resigned myself to some sleepless hours before the dawn and gazed out of the window to the cold white orb of the moon, which, I fancied, looked down upon secrets it knew but, like the intimidated Dr. Sprague, would not, or perhaps dared not, reveal.

Yet, despite my shock. I fell asleep almost at once. As if the moon had been the swaying watch of a hypnotist, I seemed to have passed without noticing into a dreaming stare. The wan, bluish radiance of the lunar disc seemed to narrow and to gather in intensity. It seemed even to go on and off periodically, though at very long intervals, as I watched and watched, seemingly for endless hours. The contrast with the surrounding darkness was great, so that the strange light illuminated nothing but itself. I seemed to know that the unseen landscape was not that which I would recognize in the light of day. As with a false memory, I felt I knew the lay of the shrouded land and that it must be a vast, bleak mountainous plateau. With equal tacit certainty I felt that the light I watched was set to guide the path of someone or something on its way home.

With this ... glimpse, I awoke to find the sun streaming on my face. Ordinarily I should have awakened with the light much sooner, and I found I shook off Morpheus with unaccustomed difficulty. I arose, showered, and dressed with a lingering sense of oppression. At the same time I eagerly anticipated whatever Dr. Harker might have to tell me. It was with some distraction that I made my way through the assigned tasks of the morning. My researches had come increasingly to seem like a charade. Of what import could fine points of exegesis of obscure old texts possibly be in the face of my employer's obviously impending collapse? Mustn't there be more significant things I could do to make his remaining weeks or days more pleasant? I resolved to make the suggestion whenever Dr. Harker should summon me. The day waned, and I suspected the old clergyman's lack of sleep had taken its toll, and that I should have to wait till the next day for our promised conversation.

To my surprise, the buzzer sounded in the library to summon me to his bedside at 9:45 in the evening. I rose with haste and paced rapidly to his door, knocking before I should venture to enter. Some moan from within I took as my invitation and turned the handle, opening the door into almost total darkness. After what I had seen the previous night, I did nor wonder at the reason.

A tired but surprisingly steady voice began to recount the strangest tale I had ever had occasion to marvel at. It is possible the disorientation I felt was due in some measure to the altogether unaccustomed tone and timber of what should have been a familiar voice. I could not imagine what tumorous occlusions could have grown so quickly so to affect his formerly clear and rather comforting voice. I will report as accurately as I can what the doomed man confided in me, as there no longer seems to be any point in keeping it to myself. The essentials are right, I am sure of that, though I will hardly blame you if you wish to accuse me of exaggerating.

ENOS Harker entered into the study of divinity at Byram Theological Seminary rather later in life than most of his classmates, having felt a dramatic "call" to the ministry in early middle age. Previously he had earned a wide reputation as an explorer, amateur archaeologist, and lecturer. Rather in the manner of Richard Haliburton, he would regale lecture-hall audiences with titillating exotica and tall tales from far corners of the globe. In fact, it was while returning to his hotel from one such engagement that his life had changed forever. While crossing town, he had felt strangely drawn to one of the storefront congregations of a small Pentecostal denomination. What attracted his attention was the sound of the sobbing hymns and shouted "prophecies" emerging from behind the painted glass of the large windows that had once displayed merchandise in the days before the neighborhood had run down. Wandering through the door and down the central aisle, he knelt with the circle of moaning seekers in what revivalists call a tarrying meeting.

Suddenly the Holy Ghost struck one of those present like lightning. She seemed to explode into almost orgasmic ecstasy, her arms flung skyward, her head thrown back, and unleashing a torrent of nonsense syllables, what Harker would learn was called “speaking in tongues", ostensibly divinely inspired oracles in genuine foreign languages unknown to the speaker in a normal waking state. Harker watched in growing alarm and yet unable to turn away. One by one. all those in the circle succumbed to the spittle-spewing frenzy, as if electrically wired in series, until it finally and ineluctably reached him.

When, in the wee hours, Harker found himself back outside on the street, he was a changed man. He began to pore over the scriptures, the copy provided him by the elders of his new religious fellowship. Not the King James Version, this Bible had been newly translated by the founder of the sect, himself under prophetic inspiration.

He returned to the shabby sanctuary every night for the next month or so, his speaking schedule forgotten and his conviction of new purpose and new destiny reinforced and focused. One midnight, the sweating, straining knot of believers, their hands clasping him about the head and shoulders, began to shudder and sway, and one of them blurted out a prophetic declamation. Brother Enos, it announced, had been set apart by the Lord to take the Full Gospel message to foreign climes as a missionary.

This duty the earnest new convert did not shirk, The sect was tiny and militant, eschewing, as is the manner of such conventicles, any cooperation with other churches varying from their own doctrine by the slightest degree. By themselves the sect, its name a jumble something like "the Fire-Baptized Temple of the Apostle of God", had neither the numbers nor the resources to maintain a theological college or a missions board. Thus his attendance at the staid Byram Seminary, theological training being a prerequisite for any reputable missionary agency.

The years of dreary dogmatics, homiletics, and biblical languages did little to dampen the fires of Enos Harker's zeal, and upon graduation and ordination he lost no time in choosing his mission field. In truth, it was not really his choice, the location being divulged to him, as he assumed, by the Holy Ghost during a dream. His destination would be a little-known recess of darkest Asia, a place of which he had never heard, a high and airless plateau called Leng.

Dr. Harker did not pause to explain how he managed to gain the cooperation of a missionary agency to journey to such a remote outpost without demonstrating any competence in the local languages. I gather, however, that with the mountain-moving (some would say "fanatical”) faith of the Pentecostalist, he simply dared to believe that the "gift of tongues" would suffice him, that when the moment came to speak the words of the gospel message, the Holy Ghost would quite literally supply the words.

He knew it would be no easy thing even to gain access to his goal. He knew how the first Christian missionaries to China and Tibet were cruelly tortured and martyred, but should this be his eventual fate, he would not shrink from it, welcoming the martyr's crown for the glory of his Lord. He had then imagined, you see, that such might be the ultimate sacrifice in the service of God. He was later to discover horrors far worse.

As the night grew deeper at the old man's bedside and I found myself, ironically, taking the role of father confessor, I was no longer so certain I cared to plumb the mystery further, but I knew it was too late to withdraw, I had the curious feeling that something more ominous awaited me than even the severest shock a mere story, even a true one, might deliver.

Enos Harker's reading while in theological school had been wider than the narrowly prescribed list of standard works drawn up by his professors. Before his abrupt conversion it had of course been wider still. He knew that other Westerners had managed to penetrate into the secret heart of Asia without molestation. Showing the proper respect for a culture in which they were visitors, and which they plainly admired, pilgrims like Madame Alexandra David-Neel and the artist Nicholas Roerich had actually been welcomed and given generous freedom in the usually off-limits regions north of the Himalayas. But they had come to learn the esoteric wisdom of the East, and he had come for quite a different purpose: to teach and to preach the glad tidings of the Holy Ghost. Still, if he came as a holy man seeking out holy men, he was sure he could make himself understood, and that he might even find a ready hearing. Such was his faith.

Dr. Harker, whose wasted constitution forbade him to enlarge upon any point not absolutely needful to relate, passed over the no doubt colorful details of the long sea voyages and difficult treks over land by the most primitive conveyances. He never expected divine inspiration to make it any easier to arrange for transportation or knowledgeable guides without him knowing the tongue-twisting languages of the many tribes and clans along his path. His earlier, purely secular travels had given him a facility for making connections, and somehow he made his way to the shunned Plateau of Leng.

Then a man of hardy physique and robust health, he had found the climb up to the frigid tableland a bracing challenge. He had picked up a smattering of Tibetan and Nepalese phrases necessary to make certain rudiments understood, but his grasp of these languages utterly failed him to understand the sudden reluctance of his guides and bearers to complete the journey up and across the plateau itself. Apparently the man who had hired them for the missionary had withheld the fact of their ultimate destination in order to get them to agree to go even this far. So all fled him. This, too, thinking of the missionary travails of Saint Paul, he took in stride.

On he pressed, finding that the way to his object was after all clearly marked, at least at night, when, from a distant structure, vague against the mist-shrouded horizon, there emerged periodically a beam of light like a beacon, he assumed, to welcome distant pilgrims to a place of holy retreat. As soon as he saw it he thought of Moses and of how God had guided the children of Israel through the wilderness as a pillar of fire by night. The redoubtable Dr. Harker took it as a good omen.

It rook several days to cross the plateau, the total flatness of the place robbing him of any sense of distance. He trudged on for hours, but the squat complex of buildings never seemed to get any closer, until all at once it loomed on the horizon. Structures began to dot the blasted landscape as he approached. Most were the broken teeth of once-proud pillars and obelisks which bore wind-eroded carvings. Upon examining one of these in the light of his lamp. Dr. Harker found long vertical columns of letters remotely resembling Tibetan, of which he had seen quite a bit during his recent journeys. But this was not precisely Tibetan. Subsequent research would disclose that what he had seen was a linguistic ancestor of the Naacal language of fabled Mu. Alternating with these mute stelae were queer carvings of unrecognizable marine creatures, some of which suggested nothing so much as the submarine behemoths of the Permian Age. But surely these glyphs had represented no actual models, but only recounted heathen myths native to the region. Still, it was singularly improbable for marine motifs to occur in the religion of a plateau in the mountainous heart of Asia.

A stiff wind suddenly blew up from out of nowhere and pommeled the intrepid missionary as if Aeolus himself would prevent him from nearing the grim pile of brooding buildings. Harker, however, had an inner drive of his own and would nor be kept from his destiny. He pressed on indefatigably. He had nearly reached the nearest of the buildings, a low, unadorned structure made of huge stone blocks that had so settled together and been smoothed by the howling winds of countless generations that they seemed almost the natural mass of a megalith. Then, without warning, a pair of stocky humanoid shapes loomed up through the ubiquitous gloom that seemed to hold daylight forever at bay. The men, for such they must have been, were completely swathed in great fur cloaks and cowls against the ripping talons of the plateau wind. They accosted the weary traveler, whether in hostility or in rescue, he could not yet surmise, and half-guided, half-carried him the rest of the way into their compound. Though the windy torrent whipped away their words like autumn leaves in a hurricane, Harker believed he caught the word "Leng."

He remembered little else until he awoke inside a dimly lit cell whose only illumination came from a small butter lamp on the floor in a corner. Of comfort there was none, save for a threadbare yak hide beneath him, which hardly softened the naked stone floor. For a moment he feared he had been consigned to some already-forgotten dungeon reserved for any so foolish as to violate the chaste isolation of the place. Then he realized the inhabitants must be a monastic fellowship of ascetics, and that they had no doubt assigned him quarters no more Spartan than their own. He resolved to try to communicate his gratitude for their rough-hewn hospitality—provided he ever saw another of his hosts.

SEVERAL days might have passed. The absolute silence, together with the lack of any hint of sunlight, made it impossible for him to gauge the passing of time. Sometimes when he would awaken from a longer or shorter period of sleep there would be a meager portion of food awaiting him, which he gratefully consumed.

Then one day, he guessed some two or three months later, he awoke to find himself not in his accustomed cell, but in the center of a circle of silent, seated forms in a large meeting hall. Butter lamps provided the only light here, too. None of the shapes could he see distinctly. It was disorienting to behold a robed figure seeming to sit or recline, then to begin to move laterally without rising. Movements were few, and bodily outlines were mostly obscured by generous folds of draping cloth, but something in the perspective suggested that occasional arm or hand motions presupposed the wrong anatomical angles.

Once in a while, there were low exchanges of unfamiliar words, though sometimes he could nor be sure whether they were sounds of intelligent conversation he heard, or rather the hypnotic drone of distant insects. The ring of the men of Leng held thus for some hours, apparently in the performance of some spiritual exercise.

Looking about him at what little the soft hazy light revealed, Harker was taken aback to notice what looked like a shadowy dais off to one end of the low but vast chamber. Atop this structure, which seemed imperceptibly to merge with an outcropping of stalagmites rising from the natural stone floor, there sprawled a shifting heap of living matter. Upon this figure Harker tried now to focus, hoping that as his eyes adjusted to the gloom he might be able to scrutinize the form more clearly.

All at once he became aware of a low sussuration that had only just broached his threshold of hearing while very gradually increasing in volume. The monks were chanting. The illumination began to grow the least bit brighter, though nowhere could Harker spy anyone adding fuel to the many small lamps or otherwise adjusting the light.

No matter; at least a better glimpse of the figure on the throne had become possible. Still his head mildly ached with the frustrated effort to put some familiar construal upon what his eyes reported. For the shape shrouded in luxuriant layers of yellow silk seemed amorphous. He had once or twice seen individuals with thyroid conditions that made them dangerously obese, women from whose limbs sagging pouches of redundant flesh depended. In these cases the conventional lineaments of the human body had become obscured like an ancient fossil encased in mud. But this comparison only began to hint at the appearance of the Hooded Thing before him. Three great bell-like funnels of lemon-yellow silk veiled thick and stumpy protrusions, presumably a head and two arms, though no recognizable flesh was visible. There were strange ... shiftings among the folds of the massive cassock that Harker found himself wishing the shadow still hid.

The chanting died away as quickly as it had begun. Now Harker felt that the still-unseen visages awaited some word from him. Sooner or later he would have to speak, else why had he come among these strange heathen people at all? So he up and spoke, knowing that in no case could his audience possibly know his language, but trusting in the promise of scripture that the Holy Ghost should fill the mouth of the one who preached the gospel. "My friends, you whose lives, like mine, are given unto spiritual things; I have journeyed far to bring you glad ridings of great joy. For unto you has come this day a Savior, who is Chr—"

"Ta tvam asi!" came back a voice, as if to punctuate his words. He knew from his seminary studies in Comparative Religion the meaning of this phrase. It was a famous quote from the Hindu Upanishads. It meant “That, thou art" and referred to the identity of the individual self with the divine Brahman. Did one of those present mean to refute his preaching with a counter-gospel? Or had the Spirit made them understand his English syllables, even as God had translated for the multitude at Pentecost so that each heard the gospel in his own native language? Did they indeed understand him? If so, what was the sense of the Hindu formula?

He had barely a moment to ask himself these questions before he felt a spiritual onrush such as he had not felt since that first night in the storefront temple. His tongue and vocal cords were no longer his own as he yielded to the impulse of the Spirit. He blanked his conscious volition and uttered forth the glossolalic syllables: Pnglui ngah Cthulhu fhtagn!

In a moment all the figures seated about him were bowing and prostrating themselves before him, or at least that was what he thought. Given the confusing body shapes and motions, he could not be sure what they were doing, but it seemed like obeisance more than anything else. He had been merely the mouthpiece for his God, no more than a messenger handing over the sealed message. It was not for him to know what words the message contained. But he thought and hoped he had somehow prophesied the glad tidings of salvation, and that his audience had found themselves cut to the quick even as Simon Peter's hearers at Pentecost. He would soon find it was not so simple as that, but whatever he had said, it had certainly met with their approval, and their attitude toward him was henceforth of the most positive and even reverential.

The Reverend Harker had made his apostolic journey to distant Leng to plant the banner of the gospel where it had never flown before. He had come to teach, and yet henceforth he found himself playing the role of learner. His mysterious hosts made that much clear, providing him with scrolls and block-print codices in great numbers.

He had, as I have said, already picked up a smattering of the central Asian languages required to make his way into the remote hinterlands, but this proved a meager basis on which to plod through lengthy and turgid volumes of metaphysics and yogic disciplines. Once or twice the monks of Leng managed to secure the temporary services of Nepalese or Chinese outsiders who might facilitate the missionary’s progress in learning, but nothing was systematic.

Nonetheless, after many clays (it later turned out to have been years!), Harker found he could understand something of the spoken language of the men of Leng—less than one might expect given the time spent among them, for it was a strange whistling, buzzing, even grinding sound hard for a Westerner to understand or reproduce. The written languages, particularly the proto-Naacal, were easier to grasp.

These studies supplied the key to a vast repository of ancient and esoteric learning. Dr. Harker was soon amazed at the wealth of lore that slept in the vast subterranean libraries of the monastery. Heathen lore it might be, but he was nor such a boor as to scoff at the gathered wisdom of a civilization ancient when his own ancestors were still huddling in caves. Some of what he read betrayed fairly close kinship with certain Hindu-Buddhist doctrines just then becoming more widely known in the West through Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East translation library. Others held surprising parallels to the familiar doctrines and commandments of his own faith.

THE turning point came, the light dawned, when at length he was presented with a very ancient parchment which, as his widening eyes deciphered line upon line, purported to be a contemporary account of the apprenticeship of Jesus of Nazareth among the adepts of Leng. Here appeared to be the answer to the long-standing riddle of the "lost" years of Jesus between his youth and his baptism in the Jordan. Everything the bemused Harker had learned up to now, no matter how outré, had not really touched him personally. This ... this struck at the heart of his faith.

Yet was it a threat to his belief? Or a supplement? Was it possible that he might be on the verge of discovering a new, or long-forgotten, dimension of the gospel? Was this why he had been so strangely drawn to the virtually unknown frontier of Leng? Was he preaching the gospel to these people? Or were they preaching it to him? It did not take him long to resolve that providence had vouchsafed him a unique opportunity to learn, and that he had best take full advantage of it.

They brought him more scrolls, more scriptures, which he devoured with a newly stoked spiritual hunger. He mastered the Upa-Puranas almost effortlessly now, and the Black Sutra of the legendary avatar U Pao opened its secrets to him. The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup remained stubbornly mute to him no longer.

Throughout the years he was allowed but brief and rare glimpses of the shrouded figure he surmised to be the abbot of this arcane fraternity. Never a word did he hear from that almost amorphous personage. It appeared that he spent most of his time in mystic contemplation. Then one day Brother Enos (as he had come to think of himself) was startled to hear the shimmering crash of a great gong reverberating throughout the nitrous low walls of the monastery. He knew something momentous must have occurred, and he half-expected one of the brethren would come to his cell to inform him what had happened. Yet it was with a mounting sense of alarm verging on panic that he roused to the bitter whine of the bone trumpet summoning him at the midnight hour to join the brethren for a procession down unfamiliar halls and ramps leading to an obscure quarter of the vast hive-like complex, the full extent of which he had never been given to suspect.

Butter lamps rested in niches along the halls, giving scarcely any illumination at all, though perhaps it was enough for eyes long accustomed to the byways of the night. The monks carried on a low chanting in some language that seemed alien to Harker even after all his studies. Once a great deal of this had transpired, the group, numbering a dozen or so, filed into a chamber that rose a good deal higher than almost any other he had seen. In the middle was a broad wooden table ringed with candles. At the center of this was a veiled heap of irregular outline. He wondered that the old abbot did not preside over what looked more and more to be a sacramental feast. Then he realized what the silken veil must cover. The masked hierophant had finished his business in this incarnation.

What would happen next? What was the nature of this ceremony? Was it a simple memorial, designed to speed the soul of the late lama to his next incarnation? Or would it somehow decide the succession to the holy throne? He would have to wait and watch.

One of the hunched, cowled shapes now held a book whose opened pages shadowed his spread hands. A new chant rose, this time in the more familiar tongue of Tibet. "Fly, fly, O Nobly Born, from this house of clay, and thou shalt behold the Obsidian Night! The Maw of Chaos! From it thou earnest; tend thou unto it! Know it for the Void of thine inmost Self! Skirt thou the perilous slopes of Sumeru and seek instead the gates of Sarkomand. Shun the ravishing sights of the Elder Deities, and know thyself as one of the Wrathful Deities." On and on it went, and Harker began to recognize it as a hellish parody of the notorious Bardo Thödöl, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

At last silence returned. Now the celebrant, having put down the book, held aloft the inscribed and rusty blade of a ceremonial knife a foot long. Others lifted up a section of the silken cloth, and the priest began to cut, to slice. Enos Harker grew increasingly terrified, sensing what was coming, yet unable even to consider the possibility with his conscious mind.

The gloved hand held out the quivering, putrescent flesh to him. with a few muttered syllables. Involuntarily, Harker’s mind supplied the gospel words, “This is my body; take, eat.” And be did. It seemed inevitable, and he even felt ashamed of his qualms, thinking of Father Abraham obeying God’s command to slay his firstborn son.

(As my employer related these shocking events, I could nor help but recall vividly how he had earlier required me to fetch for him the disgusting passage from the Necronomicon concerning the “corpse-eating cult of Leng.” Apparently he was quite well informed on the subject already.)

IN the months that followed, the destiny of Enos Harker was made clear to him. Since his return to the States, Dr. Harker’s researches had been devoted in the main to corroborating the secrets of his initiation from Western occult sources, and to finding some way of understanding them in light of Western thought, which again formed the inescapable atmosphere of his thinking.

First of all, he had managed plausibly to locate the mystical philosophy of the men of Leng as an apparent hybridizing of Manichean Gnosticism, which, as is well known, penetrated both China and central Asia well before the tenth century, and the shamanistic Bönpa faith of Tibet and Mongolia. This accounted for the strange, inverted parallels to Vajrayana Buddhism, which had largely supplanted the Bönpa in neighboring Tibet, as well as the striking dualism that opposed a set of elder deities with another set of wrathful deities.

It seemed that, on a penultimate level of being, higher than that of waking perception but lower than the Ultimate Oneness of the Void, there existed a whole geography of dream continents and oceans, with exotic names like Sarkomand, lkranos, and Mount Sumeru. It was from this strange realm, the home of the Ancient Old Ones, the Undying Masters of the Leng sect, that dreams and revelations came.

The highest point of the bizarre pseudo-Buddhistic cosmology was the universal void in which all supposed truths were revealed to be half-truths and fell away. Here chaos without form or name, beyond Namarupa, held sway. All beings were considered illusory, momentary refractions of this Bliss-void, which certain scriptures named Azathoth, others Achamoth, or Vach-Viraj. But there was a series of divine demiurges, half-real personifications of the Chaos to provide a face to whom mere humans might relate as worshipers to a god. Of these there might be many or few, depending upon the tasks and the needs of the time.

The most important of these were a pair of entities called Lloigor and Zhat, though their secret names were Nug and Yeb, and they were also known, when the stars were in certain configurations, which they now approached, by the names Klulu and Nyarlathotep. These were the avatars they would assume to ring down the curtain on each world-cycle. They might walk among men in human form, sowing madness and chaos, for these were deemed by them spiritual enlightenment* Nyarlathotep had appeared once in human form as the Egyptian pharaoh Nephren-Ka, while Klulu strode the doomed shores of Atlantis with the gaunt visage of the priest-king Kathulos. This was long ago, but at the end they would emerge again, Klulu rising from the subconscious depths of hapless human minds in a torrent of fatally maddening night terrors, while Nyarlathotep would come forth in human form again. In the meantime he would by no means leave his sons, the men of Leng, as orphans. In every generation he would live among them, psychically projecting his essence (or tulku) into a chosen vessel. This, of course, was the hierophant of Leng.

The indwelling of the deity caused a gradual transformation of the natural flesh into an exalted substance which took on more and more of the original likeness of the entity within, which was not to be seen by men. Upon the death of each vessel, the successor would be chosen by manifest signs. The sacred essence would be passed to the new avatar by means of physical ingestion. Then the acolytes would present to him the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask, and the Silken Mantle. He would pursue a life of telepathic linkage with the Klulu avatar on the Dream-Bardo, so as to know when the end of the age was imminent. The time had to be soon, for the faith of the cult of Leng, which had once (as they believed) spanned the globe, had now retreated to this single monastery, a predestined ebb such as occurs toward the end of every cosmic cycle.

There were other Byzantine complexities, such as the multitiered organization of the men of Leng; many of them were not privy to the deepest secrets and doctrines of the sect but acted chiefly as passive mediums for the voices of the Ancient Old Ones who made their directives known from time to time. The great revelation, which the reader will by now have surmised, is that Enos Harker had been chosen as the latest, and apparently the final, avatar bearing the tulku of Nyarlachotep.

HE had returned to the West only a few short years ago now, feeling the desperate need to think upon all he had heard, upon the responsibilities that now rested upon his shoulders. Those devoted to him as their priest-king, indeed as their living god, dared not question his departure, though they cannot have been very enthusiastic about it. For all they knew, he might have sensed the call to go forth into the world again, even as former avatars had done in times past, to prepare things for the final advent of Chaos when mad auroras should roll forth and blast all things with merciless, wasting light.

As I should imagine it, the very sophistication of the vessel, an educated man of the West, which made this incarnation of the tulku so very potent, also made it less predictable, less manageable than previous pontiffs, who had all been ignorant Asians born and raised in the back of beyond, dwellers in a virtual stone age bereft of culture or human contact.

We are all of us, to an unsettlingly large extent, creatures of peer opinion. The world we live in is like an atmosphere we breathe, and it is notoriously difficult not to do as the Romans do when in Rome. Thus Dr. Harker’s confusions and nagging doubts, once he returned westward, quickly blossomed into a crisis of indecision in which his loyalties to rival pictures of reality nearly tore him asunder. He tried to control his thoughts through the preparation of the scholarly monograph which I had been hired to put into final shape. His urgent wish to consult texts like the Necronomicon and the translated R'lyeb Text was really a last-ditch effort to disconfirm his own beliefs and experiences as illusions and delusions. Perhaps he had been brainwashed by the cult. He now hoped so! Better that than that the insane things he had come to believe should prove true!

But prove true they did. He had hoped that the utterances he had once thought bits of the uncouth tongue of R'lyeh would turn out to have nothing in common with what appeared to be a tangible relic of that language, translated by an objective third party. The terrible truth was that some of the same phrases he remembered hearing (and saying!) were there, and were defined exactly as he had come to understand them. There was no chance now that it was not true.

As for me, I must admit I found myself one step behind the elderly clergyman. I felt very afraid that the noose of the truth was closing about my neck as well. I desperately hoped that of which at any other time I should have felt unquestionably certain: that the man before me, plainly suffering from delirium, was raving insane. But I, too, realized it was too late for that, too late for sanity.

I NOW knew well enough the nature of the affliction that was fast ravaging the physical form of Dr. Harker. He was not after all degenerating.

He was transforming, transfiguring into the likeness of the Apostle of the Last Hour, Nyarlathotep. When that transformation was complete, that hour would have struck. The Kaliyuga was at an end. Whether the apostle emerged on this side of the world or that made little difference. Once he had sloughed off the last clinging vestige of his host Enos Harker, a human being with a human conscience, the last hopes of preventing his apocalyptic mission would vanish, too.

Silent until this point, I stammered a question to my employer, though to think of him in such terms now seemed frivolous. How could he be so strangely calm? Had he simply resigned himself to his fate? And to the grim fate to be meted out to all mankind? Or was there some last shred of hope that he had thus far kept from me?

“It may be. It may be. Earlier this evening I had a visitor. It was his coming that made me delay so long to call you here to my side. He is a man who is knowledgeable in these matters, in some ways more knowledgeable than myself despite all I have seen. He is the Swami Sunand Chandraputra, or at least that is what he requests to be called. He understands the situation quite well. He left me this.”

The bandaged, paw-like protuberance held forth an abnormally large key of tarnished and elaborately carved silver. “With this, I may venture to escape. I cannot save my life. My fate was sealed the moment I partook of the blasphemous sacrament. But it may be possible to go where the emergence of the Thing inside me will do no harm. I shall take hold of the Key, and I shall enter a state of dream more real than the illusion we now share. There I shall pass through a door, the mountain portal of Sarkomand. The Tcho-Tcho devils will be waiting for me and will try to bar the way. But if I may hold firmly to this, that they are but the groundless phantoms of my own mind, then I may win through. What will happen then. I do not know. But the way back for the avatar will be long, too long for him, having assumed the cumbersome mantle of gross flesh. Listen! The time is at hand! His dreams begin to impinge on the waking world!"

I had been vacantly aware of some increasing reverberation for some minutes, but it had not yet obtruded upon my conscious mind. Now the sound, if hard to put into words, was plainly to be heard. There seemed to be a slow and steady tread as of great steps, the steps of Leviathan shaking the earth, though I felt no physical tremor. They resounded from deep below the ground, as if from some unsuspected caverns under the earth. As the minutes passed, the echoing steps seemed to rise gradually along the bending curve of the firmament till they were close to reaching the zenith. I sat thus, my eyes fixed upon nothing in particular, waiting, listening. I jumped as the mantel clock sounded midnight. I turned to look co Dr. Harker, I suppose for some signal of guidance, only to find an empty bed.

Not entirely empty. A key, of blackened silver and of outlandish proportions, pressed its bulk into the disheveled bed sheets. Instinctively I grasped it, turned, and made for the door. I paused not, nor entered my room again to retrieve any of my few belongings, but headed inland with all the desperate speed I could muster. I had little thought of what might happen next, only that I must flee like Lot from Sodom.

I must have found my way back to my old lodgings on Parker Street, where the landlady, hearing my frantic knocking, gave me admittance. I can remember little of what passed that night or the next day, nor was I a witness of what happened at Cairn’s Point, of whatever could have happened there. As I have said, the district is largely deserted, and that is merciful, in light of what finally transpired. A derelict who chanced to be staggering down the streetcar tracks toward the beach related how he had seen first a strange flash of bluish light erupting from the top of what I am sure was Dr. Harker’s rented cabin, as if it were a lighthouse on the shore. Then there was a widening flash in which there appeared to be a knot of several figures struggling in shadowed silhouette, one larger than the rest. The authorities put that part of it down to alcoholic delusions. Nor even they can deny that something turned the whole of the beach into a great sheet of glass.

Whatever agency, whatever force, was responsible, something the chemists at Miskatonic are still debating, it also reduced the beach house of Enos Harker to a thin layer of wind-scattered soot. No search has been conducted for the missing Dr. Harker, since his infirmity was well known, and Dr. Sprague has assured the police that he could have been nowhere but in bed when disaster struck. The drifting ashes must therefore include his own.

However, I know better, and I am not alone. Dr. Sprague, not for the first time, seems to know more than he is willing to say, and Dr. Llanfer seems not to be alarmed, but rather almost relieved, as if a drama had reached its denouement. All the others are naturally upset at nor being able to file away a mystery they cannot solve. The greater mystery is that of which they have no inkling, that of the strange doom of Enos Harker.